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ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS 

PRE SCOTT 



ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS 

PRE SCOTT 



V 



■*&&& 



ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS 

WILLIAM HICKLING 
PRESCOTT 



BY 
HARRY THURSTON PECK 



Wtto Ifotft 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON : MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
I905 

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COPYBIGHT, 1905, 

By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



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3T0 
WILLIAM AKCHIBALD DUNNING 

AMICITI^E CAUSA 



PREFATORY NOTE 

For the purely biographical portion of this book an 
especial acknowledgment of obligation is due to the 
valuable collection of Prescott's letters and memoranda 
made by his friend George Ticknor, and published in 
1864 as part of Ticknor's Life of W. H. Prescott. All 
other available sources, however, have been explored, 
and are specifically mentioned either in the text or in 
the footnotes. 

H. T. P. 

Columbia University, 
March 1, 1905. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER I 



PAGE 

The New England Historians 1 



CHAPTER II 
Early Years 13 

CHAPTER III 
The Choice of a Career 39 

CHAPTER IV 
Success .54 

CHAPTER V 
In Mid Career 72 

CHAPTER VI 
The Last Ten Years 99 

CHAPTER Vn 

" Ferdinand and Isabella" — Prescott's Style . 121 

ix 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER VIII 

PAGE 

"The Conquest of Mexico " as Literature and as 

History 133 



CHAPTER IX 
"The Conquest of Peru " — "Philip II." . . .160 

CHAPTER X 
Prescott's Rank as an Historian .... 173 

Index 181 



PRE SCOTT 



WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT 

CHAPTER I 

THE NEW ENGLAND HISTORIANS 

Throughout the first few decades of the nineteenth 
century, the United States, though forming a political 
entity, were in everything but name divided into three 
separate nations, each one of which was quite unlike 
the other two. This difference sprang partly from 
the character of the population in each, partly from 
divergent tendencies in American colonial develop- 
ment, and partly from conditions which were the 
result of both these causes. The culture-history, 
therefore, of each of the three sections exhibits, 
naturally enough, a distinct and definite phase of 
intellectual activity, which is reflected very clearly in 
the records of American literature. 

In the Southern States, just as in the Southern 
colonies out of which they grew, the population was 
homogeneous and of English stock. Almost the sole 
occupation of the people was agriculture, while the 
tone of society was markedly aristocratic, as was to 
be expected from a community dominated by great 
landowners who were also the masters of many 
slaves. These landowners, living on their estates 
rather than in towns and cities, caring nothing for 
b 1 



2 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

commerce or for manufactures, separated from one 
another by great distances, and cherishing the intensely- 
conservative traditions of that England which saw 
the last of the reigning Stuarts, were inevitably des- 
tined to intellectual stagnation. The management of 
their plantations, the pleasures of the chase, and the 
exercise of a splendid though half-barbaric hospitality, 
satisfied the ideals which they had inherited from their 
Tory ancestors. Horses and hounds, a full-blooded 
conviviality, and the exercise of a semi-feudal power, 
occupied their minds and sufficiently diverted them. 
Such an atmosphere was distinctly unfavourable to 
the development of a love of letters and of learning. 
The Southern gentleman regarded the general diffusion 
of education as a menace to his class ; while for him- 
self he thought it more or less unnecessary. He 
gained a practical knowledge of affairs by virtue of 
his position. As for culture, he had upon the shelves 
of his library, where also were displayed his weapons 
and the trophies of the chase, a few hundred volumes 
of the standard essayists, poets, and dramatists of a 
century before. If he seldom read them and never 
added to them, they at least implied a recognition of 
polite learning and such a degree of literary taste as 
befitted a Virginian or Carolinian gentleman. But, 
practically, English literature had for him come to an 
end with Addison and Steele and Pope and their con- 
temporaries. The South stood still in the domain of 
letters and education. Not that there were lacking 
men who cherished the ambition to make for them- 
selves a name in literature. There were many such, 
among whom Gayarre, Beverly, and Byrd deserve an 
honourable remembrance 5 but their surroundings were 



i] THE NEW ENGLAND HISTORIANS 3 

unfavourable, and denied to them that intelligent 
appreciation which inspires the man of letters to press 
on to fresh achievement. An interesting example is 
found in the abortive history of Virginia undertaken 
by Dr. William Stith, who was President of William 
and Mary College, and who possessed not only schol- 
arship but the gift of literary expression. The work 
which he began, however, was left unfinished, because 
of an utter lack of interest on the part of the public 
for whom it had been undertaken. Dr. Stith's own 
quaint comment throws a light upon contemporary 
conditions. He had laboured diligently in collecting 
documents which represented original sources of infor- 
mation; yet, when he came to publish the first and 
only volume of his history, he omitted many of them, 
giving as his reason: — 

" I perceive, to my no small Surprise and Mortification, 
that some of my Countrymen (and those too, Persons of 
high Fortune and Distinction) seemed to be much alarmed, 
and to grudge, that a complete History of their own Country 
would run to more than one Volume, and cost them above 
half a Pistole. I was, therefore, obliged to restrain my 
Hand, . . . for fear of enhancing the Price, to the immense 
Charge and irreparable Damage of such generous and pub- 
lick-spirited Gentlemen." * 

The Southern universities were meagrely attended ; 
and though the sons of wealthy planters might some- 
times be sent to Oxford or, more usually, to Princeton 
or to Yale, the discipline thus acquired made no 
general impression upon the class to which they 
belonged. In fact, the intellectual energy of the South 
found its only continuous and powerful expression in 

1 Quoted by Jameson : Historical Writing in America, p. 72 > 
Boston, 1891. 



4 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

the field of politics. To government and statesmanship 
its leading minds gave much attention, for only thus 
could they retain in national affairs the supremacy 
which they arrogated to themselves and which was 
necessary to preserve their peculiar institution. Hence, 
there were to be found among the leaders of the 
Southern people a few political philosophers like 
Jefferson, a larger number of political casuists like 
Calhoun, and a swarm of political rhetoricians like Pat- 
rick Henry, Hayne, Legare, and Yancey. But beyond 
the limits of political life the South was intellec- 
tually sterile. So narrowing and so hostile to lib- 
eral culture were its social conditions that even to 
this day it has not produced a single man of letters 
who can be truthfully described as eminent, unless 
the name of Edgar Allan Poe be cited as an excep- 
tion whose very brilliance serves only to prove and 
emphasise the rule. 

In the Middle States, on the other hand, a very dif- 
ferent condition of things existed. Here the popula- 
tion was never homogeneous. The English Koyalists 
and the Dutch in New York, the English Quakers and 
the Germans in Pennsylvania and the Swedes in Dela- 
ware, made inevitable, from the very first, a cosmopoli- 
tanism that favoured variety of interests, with a 
resulting breadth of view and liberality of thought. 
Manufactures flourished and foreign commerce was 
extensively pursued, insuring diversity of occupation. 
The two chief cities of the nation were here, and not 
far distant from each other. Wealth was not unevenly 
distributed, and though the patroon system had cre- 
ated in New York a landed gentry, this class was 
small, and its influence was only one of many. Com- 



i.] THE NEW ENGLAND HISTORIANS 5 

fort was general, religious freedom was unchallenged, 
education was widely and generally diffused. The 
large urban population created an atmosphere of ur- 
banity. Even in colonial times, New York and Phila- 
delphia were the least provincial of American towns. 
They attracted to themselves, not only the most inter- 
esting people from the other sections, but also many a 
European wanderer, who found there most of the 
essential graces of life, with little or none of that 
combined austerity and rawness which elsewhere 
either disgusted or amused him. We need not wonder, 
then, if it was in the Middle States that American 
literature really found its birth, or if the forms which 
it there assumed were those which are touched by 
wit and grace and imagination. Franklin, frozen and 
repelled by what he thought the bigotry of Boston, 
sought very early in his life the more congenial atmos- 
phere of Philadelphia, where he found a public for 
his copious writings, which, if not precisely literature, 
were, at any rate, examples of strong, idiomatic Eng- 
lish, conveying the shrewd philosophy of an original 
mind. Charles Brockden Brown first blazed the way 
in American fiction with six novels, amid whose turgid 
sentences and strange imaginings one may here and 
there detect a touch of genuine power and a striving 
after form. Washington Irving, with his genial 
humour and well-bred ease, was the very embodiment 
of the spirit of New York. Even Professor Barrett 
Wendell, whose critical bias is wholly in favour of New 
England, declares that Irving was the first of Ameri- 
can men of letters, as he was certainly the first Ameri- 
can writer to win a hearing outside of his own country. 
And to these we may add still others, — Freneau, from 



6 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

whom both Scott and Campbell borrowed; Cooper, with 
his stirring sea-tales and stories of Indian adventure ; 
and Bryant, whose early verses were thought to be too 
good to have been written by an American. And 
there were also Drake and Halleck and Woodworth 
and Paine, some of whose poetry still continues to be 
read and quoted. The mention of them serves as a 
reminder that American literature in the nineteenth 
century, like English literature in the fourteenth, 
found its origin where wealth, prosperity, and a degree 
of social elegance made possible an appreciation of 
belles-lettres. 

Far different was it in New England. There, as in 
the South, the population was homogeneous and Eng- 
lish. But it was a Puritan population, of which the 
environment and the conditions of its life retarded, 
and at the same time deeply influenced, the evolution 
of its literature. One perceives a striking parallel 
between the early history of the people of New England 
and that of the people of ancient Eome. Each was 
forced to wrest a living from a rugged soil. Each 
dwelt in constant danger from formidable enemies. 
The Eoman was ready at every moment to draw his 
sword for battle with Faliscans, Samnites, or Etrus- 
cans. The New Englander carried his musket with 
him even to the house of prayer, fearing the attack of 
Pequots or Narragansetts. The exploits of such half- 
mythical Eoman heroes as Camillus and Cincinnatus 
find their analogue in the achievements credited to 
Miles Standish and the doughty Captain Church. Early 
Eome knew little of the older and more polished civili- 
sation of Greece. New England was separated by 
vast distances from the richer life of Europe. In 



I.] THE NEW ENGLAND HISTORIANS 7 

Rome, as in New England, religion was linked closely 
with all the forms of government ; and it was a religion 
which appealed more strongly to men's sense of duty 
and to their fears, than to their softer feelings. The 
Roman gods needed as much propitiation as did the 
God of Jonathan Edwards. When a great calamity 
befell the Roman people, they saw in it the wrath of 
their divinities precisely as the true New Englander 
was taught to view it as a " providence. n In both ' 
commonwealths, education of an elementary sort was 
deemed essential ; but it was long before it reached 
the level of illumination. 

Like influences yield like results. The Roman 
character, as moulded in the Republic's early years, 
was one of sternness and efficiency. It lacked gayety, 
w r armth, and flexibility. And the New England char- 
acter resembled it in all of these respects. The his- 
toric worthies of Old Rome would have been very 
much at ease in early Massachusetts. Cato the Censor 
could have hobnobbed with old Josiah Quincy, for 
they were temperamentally as like as two peas. It is 
only the Romans of the Empire who would have felt 
out of place in a New England environment. Horace 
might conceivably have found a smiling angulus ter- 
rarum somewhere on the lower Hudson, but he would 
have pined away beside the Nashua; while to Ovid, 
Beacon Street would have seemed as ghastly as the 
frozen slopes of Tomi. And when we compare the 
native period of Roman literature with the early years 
of New England's literary history, the parallel be- 
comes more striking still. In New England, as in 
Rome, beneath all the forms of a self-governing and 
republican State, there existed a genuine aristocracy 



8 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

whose prestige was based on public service of some 
sort ; and in New England, as in Rome, public service 
had in it a theocratic element. In civil life, the most 
honourable occupation for a free citizen was to share 
in this public service. Hence, the disciplines which 
had a direct relation to government were the only civic 
disciplines to be held in high consideration. Such an 
attitude profoundly affected the earliest attempts at 
literature. The two literary or semi-literary pursuits 
which have a close relation to statesmanship are 
oratory and history — oratory, which is the statesman's 
instrument, and history, which is in part the record of 
his achievements. Therefore, at Rome, a line of native 
orators arose before a native poet won a hearing, and 
therefore, too, the annalists and chroniclers precede 
the dramatists. 

In New England it was much the same. Almost 
from the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, 
there were men among the colonists who wrote down 
with diffusive dulness the records of whatever they 
had seen and suffered. Governor William Bradford 
composed a history of New England; and Thomas 
Prince, minister of the Old South Church, compiled 
another work of like title, described by its author 
as told "in the Form of Annals." Hutchinson pre- 
pared a history of Massachusetts Bay ; and many others 
had collected local traditions, which seemed to them 
of great moment, and had preserved them in books, 
or else in manuscripts which were long afterwards to 
be published by zealous antiquarians. Cotton Mather's 
curious Magnolia, printed in 1700, was intended by 
its author to be history, though strictly speaking it is 
theological and is clogged with inappropriate learning, 



i.] THE NEW ENGLAND HISTORIANS 

— Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. The parallel between 
early Rome and early Massachusetts breaks down, 
however, when we consider the natural temperament 
of the two peoples as distinct from that which external 
circumstances cultivated in them. Underneath the 
sternness and severity which were the fruits of Puri- 
tanism, there existed in the New England character a 
touch of spirituality, of idealism, and of imagination 
such as were always foreign to the Romans. Under 
the repression of a grim theocracy, New England 
idealism still found its necessary outlet in more than 
one strange form. We can trace it in the hot religious 
eloquence of Edwards even better than in the imita- 
tive poetry of Mrs. Bradstreet. It is to be found even 
in such strange panics as that which shrieked for the 
slaying of the Salem " witches." Time alone was 
needed to bring tolerance and intellectual freedom, and 
with them a freer choice of literary themes and moods. 
The New England temper remained, and still remains, 
a serious one ; yet ultimately it was to find expression 
in forms no longer harsh and rigid, but modelled upon 
the finer lines of truth and beauty. 

The development was a, gradual one. The New 
England spirit still exacted sober subjects of its 
writers. And so the first evolution of New England 
literature took place along the path of historical com- 
position. The subjects were still local or, at the most, 
national ; but there was a steady drift away from the 
annalistic method to one which partook of conscious 
art. In the writings of Jared Sparks there is seen 
imperfectly the scientific spirit, entirely self-developed 
and self-trained. His laborious collections of histori- 
cal material, and his dry but accurate biographies, 



10 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

mark a distinct advance beyond his predecessors. Here, 
at least, are historical scholarship and, in the main, 
a conscientious scrupulosity in documentation. It is 
true that Sparks was charged, and not quite unjustly, 
with garbling some of the material which he preserved ; 
yet, on the whole, one sees in him the founder of a 
school of American historians. What he wrote was 
history, if it was not literature. George Bancroft, his 
contemporary, wrote history, and was believed for a 
time to have written it in literary form. To-day his 
six huge volumes, which occupied him fifty years in 
writing, and which bring the reader only to the inau- 
guration of Washington, make but slight appeal to a 
cultivated taste. The work is at once too ponderous 
and too rhetorical. Still, in its way, it marks another 
step. 

Up to this time, however, American historians were 
writing only for a restricted public. They had not 
won a hearing beyond the country whose early history 
they told. Their themes possessed as yet no interest 
for foreign nations, where the feeble American Repub- 
lic was little known and little noticed. The republi- 
can experiment was still a doubtful one, and there was 
nothing in the somewhat paltry incidents of its early 
years to rivet the attention of the other hemisphere. 
" America " was a convenient term to denote an indefi- 
nite expanse of territory somewhere beyond seas. A 
London bishop could write to a clergyman in New 
York and ask him for details about the work of a 
missionary in Newfoundland without suspecting the 
request to be absurd. The British War Office could 
believe the river Bronx a mighty stream, the crossing 
of which was full of strategic possibilities. As for 



i.] THE NEW ENGLAND HISTORIANS 11 

the American people, they interested Europe about as 
much as did the Boers in the days of the early treks. 
Even so acute an observer as Talleyrand, after visiting 
the United States, carried away with him only a gen- 
eral impression of rusticity and bad manners. When 
Napoleon asked him what he thought of the Ameri- 
cans, he summed up his opinion with a shrug : Sire, ce 
sont des Jiers cocJions et des cochons Jiers. Tocqueville 
alone seems to have viewed the nascent nation with 
the eye of prescience. For the rest, petty skirmishes 
with Indians, a few farmers defending a rustic bridge, 
and a somewhat discordant gathering of planters, 
country lawyers, and drab-clad tradesmen held few 
suggestions of the picturesque and, to most minds, 
little that was significant to the student of politics 
and institutional history. 

There were, however, other themes, American in a 
larger sense, which contained within themselves all 
the elements of the romantic, while they closely linked 
the ambitions of old Europe with the fortunes and the 
future of the New World. The narration of these 
might well appeal to that interest which the more 
sober annals of England in America wholly failed to 
rouse. There was the story of New Erance, which had 
for its background a setting of savage nature, while in 
the foreground was fought out the struggle between 
Englishmen and Frenchmen, at grips in a feud per- 
petuated through the centuries. There was the story 
of Spanish conquest in the south, — a true romance of 
chivalry, which had not yet been told in all its rich- 
ness of detail. To choose a subject of this sort, and to 
develop it in a fitting way, was to write at once for 
the Old World and the New. The task demanded 



12 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap i. 

scholarship, and presented formidable difficulties. The 
chief sources of information were to be found in 
foreign lands. To secure them needed wealth. To 
compare and analyse and sift them demanded critical 
judgment of a high order. And something more was 
needed, — a capacity for artistic presentation. When 
both these gifts were found united in a single mind, 
historical writing in New England had passed beyond 
the confines of its early crudeness and had reached 
the stage where it claimed rank as lasting literature. 
Eightly viewed, the name of William Hickling Pres- 
cott is something more than a mere landmark in the 
field of historical composition. It signalises the begin- 
ning of a richer growth in New England letters, — the 
coming of a time when the barriers of a Puritan scho- 
lasticism were broken down. Prescott is not merely 
the continuator of Sparks. He is the precursor of 
Hawthorne and Parkman and Lowell. He takes 
high rank among American historians ; but he is 
enrolled as well in a still more illustrious group by 
virtue of his literary fame. 



CHAPTER II 



EARLY YEARS 



To the native-born Kew Englander the name of Pres- 
cott has, for more than a century, possessed associa- 
tions that give to it the stamp of genuine distinction. 
Those who have borne it have belonged of right to the 
true patriciate of their Commonwealth. ThePrescotts 
were from the first a fighting race, and their men were 
also men of mind ; and, according to the times in 
which they lived, they displayed one or the other 
characteristic in a very marked degree. The pioneer 
among them on American soil was John Prescott, a 
burly Puritan soldier who had fought under Cromwell, 
and who loved danger for its own sake. He came 
from Lancashire to Massachusetts about twenty years 
after the landing of the Mayflower, and at once pushed 
off into the unbroken wilderness to mark out a large 
plantation for himself in what is now the town of 
Lancaster. A half-verified tradition describes him as 
having brought with him a coat of mail and a steel 
helmet, glittering in which he often terrified maraud- 
ing Indians who ventured near his lands. His son 
and grandson and his three great-grandsons all served 
as officers in the military forces of Massachusetts ; and 
among the last was Colonel William Prescott, who 
commanded the American troops at Bunker Hill. 
Later, he served under the eye of Washington, who 

13 



U WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

personally commended liim after the battle of Long 
Island ; and he took part in the defeat of Burgoyne at 
Saratoga — a success which brought the arms of France 
to the support of the American cause. 

In times of peace as well, the Prescotts were men 
of light and leading. Their names are found upon 
the rolls of the Massachusetts General Court, of the 
Governor's Council in colonial days, of the Continen- 
tal Congress, and of the State judiciary. One of them, 
Oliver Prescott, a brother of the Eevolutionary war- 
rior, who had been bred as a physician, made some 
elaborate researches on the subject of that curious 
drug, ergot, and embodied his results in a paper of 
such value as to attract the notice of the profession in 
Europe. It was translated into French and German, 
and was included in the Dictionnaire des Sciences Medi- 
cates — an unusual compliment for an American of those 
days to receive. Most eminent of all the Prescotts in 
civil life, however, before the historian won his fame, 
was William Prescott, — the family names were contin- 
ually repeated, — whose career was remarkable for its 
distinction, and whose character is significant because 
of its influence upon his illustrious son. William Pres- 
cott was born in 1762, and, after a most careful train- 
ing, entered Harvard, from which he was graduated 
in 1783. Admitted to the bar, he won high rank in 
his profession, twice receiving and twice declining an 
appointment to the Supreme Court of the State. His 
widely recognised ability brought him wealth, so that 
he lived in liberal fashion, in a home whose generous 
appointments and cultivated ease created an atmos- 
phere that was rare indeed in those early days, when 
narrow means and a crude provincialism combined to 



II.] EARLY YEARS 15 

make New England life unlovely. Prescott was not 
only an able lawyer, the worthy compeer of Dexter, 
Otis, and Webster — he was a scholar by instinct, 
widely read, thoughtful, and liberal-minded in the 
best sense of the word. His intellectual conflicts with 
such professional antagonists as have just been named 
gave him mental flexibility and a delightful sanity; 
and though in temperament he was naturally of a 
serious turn, he had both pungency and humour at 
his command. No more ideal father could be imag- 
ined for a brilliant son; for he was affectionate, gener- 
ous, and sympathetic, with a knowledge of the world, 
and a happy absence of Puritan austerity. He had, 
moreover, the very great good fortune to love and 
marry a woman dowered with every quality that can 
fill a house with sunshine. This was Catherine Hick- 
ling, the daughter of a prosperous Boston merchant, 
afterward American consul in the Azores. As a girl, 
and indeed all through her long and happy life, she 
was the very spirit of healthful, normal womanhood, 
— full of an irrepressible and infectious gayety, a 
miracle of buoyant life, charming in manner, unselfish, 
helpful, and showing in her every act and thought the 
promptings of a beautiful and spotless soul. 

It was of this admirably mated pair that William 
Hickling Prescott, their second son, was born, at Salem, 
on the 4th of May, 1796. The elder Prescott had 
not yet acquired the ample fortune which he after- 
ward possessed ; yet even then his home was that of 
a man of easy circumstances, — one of those big, com- 
fortable, New England houses, picturesquely situated 
amid historic surroundings. 1 Here young Prescott 

1 This house was long ago demolished. Its site is now occupied 
by Plummer Hall, containing a public library. 



16 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

spent the first twelve years of his life under his 
mother's affectionate care, and here began his educa- 
tion, first at a sort of dame school, kept by a kindly 
maiden lady, Miss Mehitable Higginson, and then, 
from about the age of seven, under the more formal 
instruction of an excellent teacher, Mr. Jacob Newman 
Knapp, quaintly known as "Master Knapp." It was 
here that he began to reveal certain definite and very 
significant traits of character. The record of them is 
interesting, for it shows that, but for the accident 
which subsequently altered the whole tenor of his life, 
he might have grown up into a far from admirable 
man, even had he escaped moral shipwreck. Many of 
his natural traits, indeed, were of the kind that need 
restraint to make them safe to their possessor, and in 
these early years restraint was largely lacking in the 
life of the young Prescott, who, it may frankly be 
admitted, was badly spoiled. His father, preoccupied 
in his legal duties, left him in great part to his mother's 
care, and his mother, who adored him for his clever- 
ness and good looks, could not bear to check him in 
the smallest of his caprices. He was, indeed, pecul- 
iarly her own, since from her he had inherited so 
much. By virtue of his natural gifts, he was, no 
doubt, a most attractive boy. Handsome, like his 
father, he had his mother's vivacity and high spirits 
almost in excess. Quick of mind, imaginative, full of 
eager curiosity, and with a tenacious memory, it is no 
wonder that her pride in him was great, and that her 
mothering heart went out to him in unconscious recog- 
nition of a kindred temperament. But his school 
companions, and even his elders, often found these 
ebullient spirits of his by no means so delightful. 



ii.] EARLY YEARS 17 

The easy-going indulgence which he met at home, and 
very likely also the recognised position of his father 
in that small community, combined to make young 
Prescott wilful and self-confident and something of 
an enfant terrible. He was allowed to say precisely 
what he thought, and he did invariably say it on all 
occasions and to persons of every age. In fact, he 
acquired a somewhat unenviable reputation for rude- 
ness, while his high spirits prompted him to contrive 
all sorts of practical jokes — a form of humour which 
seldom tends to make one popular. Moreover, though 
well-grown for his age, he had a distaste for physical 
exertion, and took little or no part in active outdoor 
games. Naturally, therefore, he was not particularly 
liked by his school companions, while, on the other 
hand, he attained no special rank in the schoolroom. 
Although he was quick at learning, he contented him- 
self with satisfying the minimum of what was required 
— a trait that remained very characteristic of him for 
a long time. Of course, there is no particular signifi- 
cance in the general statement that a boy of twelve 
was rude, mischievous, physically indolent, and averse 
to study. Yet in Prescott's case these qualities were 
somewhat later developed at a critical period of his 
life, and might have spoiled a naturally fine character 
had they not been ultimately checked and controlled 
by the memorable accident which befell him a few 
years afterward. 

In 1803, the elder Prescott suffered from a hem- 
orrhage from the lungs which compelled him for a 
time to give up many of his professional activities. 
Five years after this he removed his home to Boston, 
where the practice of his profession would be less 



18 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

burdensome, and where, as it turned out, his income 
was very largely increased. The change was fortu- 
nate both for him and for his son ; since, in a larger 
community, the boy came to be less impressed with his 
own importance, and also fell under an influence far 
more stimulating than could ever have been exerted by 
a village schoolmaster. The rector of Trinity Church 
in Boston, the Eev. Dr. John S. Gardiner, was a gentle- 
man of exceptional cultivation. As a young man he had 
been well trained in England under the learned Dr. 
Samuel Parr, a Latinist of the Ciceronian school. He 
was, besides, a man possessing many genial and very 
human qualities, so that all who knew him felt his 
personal fascination to a rare degree. He had at one 
time been the master of a classical school in Boston and 
had met with much success ; but his clerical duties 
had obliged him to give up this occupation. There- 
after, he taught only a small number of boys, the sons 
of intimate friends in whom he took a special and 
personal interest. His methods with them were not 
at all those of a typical schoolmaster. He received 
his little classes in the library of his home, and taught 
them, in a most informal fashion, English, Greek, and 
Latin. He resembled, indeed, one of those ripe 
scholars of the Renaissance who taught for the pure 
love of imparting knowledge. Much of his instruction 
was conveyed orally rather than through the medium 
of text-books ; and his easy talk, flowing from a full 
mind, gave interest and richness to his favourite sub- 
jects. Such teaching as this is always rare, and it was 
peculiarly so in that age of formalism. To the privi- 
lege of Dr. Gardiner's instruction, young Prescott was 
admitted, and from it he derived not only a correct 



il] EARLY YEARS 19 

feeling for English style, but a genuine love of classical 
study, which remained with him throughout his life. 
It may be said here that he never at any time felt an 
interest in mathematics or the natural sciences. His 
cast of mind was naturally humanistic; and now, 
through the influence of an accomplished teacher, he 
came to know the meaning and the beauty of the 
classical tradition. 

Under Gardiner, Prescott's indifference to study 
disappeared, and he applied himself so well that he 
was rapidly advanced from elementary reading to the 
study of authors so difficult as iEschylus. His biogra- 
pher, Mr. Ticknor, who was his fellow-pupil at this 
time, has left us some interesting notes upon the sub- 
ject of Prescott's literary preferences. It appears that 
he enjoyed Sophocles, while Horace " interested and 
excited him beyond his years." The pessimism of 
Juvenal he disliked, and the crabbed verse of Persius 
he utterly refused to read. Under private teachers he 
studied French, Italian, and Spanish, — a rather un- 
usual thing for boys at that time, — and he reluctantly 
acquired what he regarded as the irreducible minimum 
of mathematics. It was decided that he should be 
fitted to enter the Sophomore Class in Harvard, and to 
this end he devoted his mental energies. Like most boys, 
he worked hardest upon those studies which related to 
his college examination, viewing others as more or less 
superfluous. He did, however, a good deal of miscella- 
neous reading, opportunities for which he found in the 
Boston Athenaeum. This institution had been opened 
but a short time before, and its own collection of books, 
which to-day numbers more than two hundred thou- 
sand, was rather meagre ; but in it had been deposited 



20 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

some ten thousand volumes, constituting the private 
library of John Quincy Adams, who was then holding 
the post of American Minister to Eussia. At a time 
when book-shops were few, and when books were im- 
ported from England with much difficulty and expense, 
these ten thousand volumes seemed an enormous treas- 
ure-house of good reading. Prescott browsed through 
the books after the fashion of a clever boy, picking out 
what took his fancy and neglecting everything that 
seemed at all uninteresting. Yet this omnivorous 
reading stimulated his love of letters and gave to him 
a larger range of vision than at that time he could prob- 
ably have acquired in any other way. It is interest- 
ing to note the fact that his preference was for old 
romances — the more extravagant the better — and 
for tales of wild and lawless adventure. An especial 
favourite with him was the romance of Amadis de 
Gaule, which he found in Southey's somewhat pedes- 
trian translation, and which appealed intensely to 
Prescott's imagination and his love of the fantastic. 

His other occupations were decidedly significant. 
His most intimate friend at this time was William 
Gardiner, his preceptor's son ; and the two boys were 
absolutely at one in their tastes and amusements. Both 
of them were full of mischief, and both were irrepressi- 
bly boisterous, playing all sorts of tricks at evening 
in the streets, firing off pistols, and in general caus- 
ing a good deal of annoyance to the sober citizens of 
Boston. In this they were like any other healthy 
boys, — full of animal spirits and looking for " fun " 
without any especial sense of responsibility. Some- 
thing else, however, is recorded of them which seems 
to have a real importance, as revealing in Prescott, at 



ii.] EARLY YEARS 21 

least, some of those mental characteristics which in 
his after life were to find expression in his serious 
work. 

The period was one when the thoughts of all men 
were turned to the Napoleonic wars. The French and 
English were at grips in Spain for the possession of 
the Peninsula. Wellington had landed in Portugal 
and, marching into Spain, had flung down the gage of 
battle, which was taken up by Soult, Massena, and 
Victor, in the absence of their mighty chief. The 
American newspapers were filled with long, though 
belated, accounts of the brilliant fighting at Ciudad 
Rodrigo, Almeida, and Badajoz ; and these narratives 
fired the imagination of Prescott, whose eagerness his 
companion found infectious, so that the two began to 
play at battles ; not after the usual fashion of boys, 
but in a manner recalling the Kriegsjnel of the mili- 
tary schools of modern Germany. Pieces of paper 
were carefully cut into shapes which would serve to 
designate the difference between cavalry, infantry, 
and artillery; and with these bits of paper the dis- 
position and manoeuvring of armies were indicated, 
so as to make clear, in a rough way, the tactics of the 
opposing commanders. Not alone were the Napoleonic 
battles thus depicted, but also the great contests of 
which the boys had read or heard at school, — Ther- 
mopylae, Marathon, Leuctra, Cannae, and Pharsalus. 
Some pieces of old armour, unearthed among the 
rubbish of the Athenaeum, enabled the boys to mimic 
in their play the combats of Amadis and the knights 
with whom he fought. 

Side by side with these amusements there was 
another which curiously supplemented it. As Pres- 



22 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

cott and his friend went through, the streets on their 
way to school, they made a practice of inventing im- 
promptu stories, which they told each other in alter- 
nation. If the story was unfinished when they arrived 
at school, it would be resumed on their way home 
and continued until it reached its end. It was here 
that Prescott's miscellaneous reading stood him in 
good stead. His mind was full of the romances and 
histories that he had read ; and his quick invention 
and lively imagination enabled him to piece together 
the romantic bits which he remembered, and to give 
them some sort of consistency and form. Ticknor 
attaches little importance either to Prescott's interest 
in the details of warfare or to this fondness of his for 
improvised narration. Yet it is difficult not to see in 
both of them a definite bias ; and we may fairly hold 
that the boy's taste for battles, coupled with his love 
of picturesque description, foreshadowed, even in these 
early years, the qualities which were to bring him last- 
ing fame. 

All these boyish amusements, however, came to an 
end when, in August, 1811, Prescott presented himself 
as a candidate for admission to Harvard. Harvard 
was then under the presidency of the Rev. Dr. John 
Thornton Kirkland, who had been installed in office 
the year before Prescott entered college. President 
Kirkland was the first of Harvard's really eminent 
presidents. 1 Under his rule there definitely began that 
slow but steady evolution, which was, in the end, to 
transform the small provincial college into a great and 
splendid university. Kirkland was an earlier Eliot, 

1 A very interesting appreciation of President Kirkland is given 
by Dr. A. P. Peabodyin his Harvard Reminiscences (Boston, 1888). 



i 



ii.] EARLY YEARS 23 

and some of his views seemed as radical to his col- 
leagues as did those of Eliot in 1869. Lowell has said 
of him, somewhat unjustly : " He was a man of genius, 
but of genius that evaded utilisation." It is fairer to 
suppose that, if he did not accomplish all that he 
desired and attempted, this was because the time was 
not yet ripe for radical innovations. He did secure 
large benefactions to the University, the creation of 
new professorships on endowed foundations, and the 
establishment of three professional schools. President 
Kirkland, in reality, stood between the old order and 
the new, with his face set toward the future, but 
retaining still some of the best traditions of the small 
college of the past. It is told of him that he knew 
every student by name, and took a very genuine in- 
terest in all of them, helping them in many quiet, 
tactful ways, so that more than one distinguished man 
in later life declared that, but for the thoughtful and 
unsolicited kindness of Dr. Kirkland, he would have 
been forced to abandon his college life in debt and in 
despair. Kirkland was a man of striking personal 
presence, and could assume a bearing of such im- 
pressive dignity as to verge on the majestic, as when 
he officially received Lafayette in front of University 
Hall and presented the assembled students to the 
nation's guest. The faculty over which he presided 
contained at that time no teacher of enduring reputa- 
tion, 1 so that whatever personal influence was exerted 
upon Prescott by his instructors must have come chiefly 
from such intercourse as he had with Dr. Kirkland. 

1 John Quincy Adams was titularly Professor of Rhetoric, but 
he had been absent for several years on a diplomatic mission in 
Europe. 



24 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

It is of interest to note just how much of an ordeal 
an entrance examination at Harvard was at the time 
when Prescott came up as a candidate for admission. 
The subjects were very few in number, and would 
appear far from formidable to a modern Freshman. 
Dalzel's Collectanea Oroeca Minora, the Greek Testa- 
ment, Vergil, Sallust, and several selected orations of 
Cicero represented, with the Greek and Latin gram- 
mars, the classical requirements which constituted, 
indeed, almost the entire test, since the only other 
subjects were arithmetic, " so for as the rule of three," 
and a general knowledge of geography. The curricu- 
lum of the College, while Prescott was a member of 
it, was meagre enough when compared with what is 
offered at the present time. The classical languages 
occupied most of the students' attention. Sallust, 
Livy, Horace, and one of Cicero's rhetorical treatises 
made up the principal work in Latin. Xenophon's 
Anabasis, Homer, and some desultory selections from 
other authors were supposed to give a sufficient know- 
ledge of Greek literature. The Freshmen completed 
the study of arithmetic, and the Sophomores did 
something in algebra and geometry. Other subjects 
of study were rhetoric, declamation, a modicum of 
history, and also logic, metaphysics, and ethics. The 
ecclesiastical hold upon the College was seen in the 
inclusion of a lecture course on " some topic of posi- 
tive or controversial divinity," in an examination on 
Doddridge's Lectures, in the reading of the Greek 
Testament, and in a two years' course in Hebrew for 
Sophomores and Freshmen. Indeed, Hebrew was 
regarded as so important that a " Hebrew part " was 
included in every commencement programme until 



ii.] EARLY YEARS 25 

1817 — three years after Prescott' s graduation. In 
place of this language, however, while Prescott was in 
college, students might substitute a course in French 
given by a tutor ; for as yet no regular chair of modern 
languages had been founded in the University. The 
natural sciences received practically no attention, 
although, in 1805, a chair of natural history had been 
endowed by subscription. An old graduate of Har- 
vard has recorded the fact that chemistry in those days 
was regarded very much as we now look upon alchemy ; 
and that, on its practical side, it was held to be sim- 
ply an adjunct to the apothecary's profession. A few 
years later, and the Harvard faculty contained such 
eminent men as Josiah Quincy, Judge Joseph Story, 
Benjamin Peirce, the mathematician, George Ticknor, 
and Edward Everett, and the opportunities for serious 
study were broadened out immensely. But while Pres- 
cott was an undergraduate, the curriculum had less 
variety and range than that of any well-equipped high 
school of the present day. 

A letter written by Prescott on August 23d, the 
day after he had passed through the ordeal of examina- 
tion, is particularly interesting. It gives, in the first 
place, a notion of the quaint simplicity which then 
characterised the academic procedure of the oldest of 
American universities ; and it also brings us into 
rather intimate touch with Prescott himself as a 
youth of fifteen. At that time a great deal of the 
eighteenth-century formality survived in the inter- 
course between fathers and their sons ; and especially 
in the letters which passed between them was there 
usually to be found a degree of stiffness and restraint 
both in feeling and expression. Yet this letter of 



26 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

Prescott's might have been written yesterday by an 
American youth of the present time, so easy and 
assured is it, and indeed, for the most part, so mature. 
It might have been written also to one of his own age, 
and there is something deliciously naive in its revela- 
tion of Prescott's approbativeness. The boy evidently 
thought very well of himself, and was not at all averse 
to fishing for a casual compliment from others. The 
letter is given in full by Ticknor, but what is here 
quoted contains all that is important : — 

" Boston, August 23rd. 

" Dear Father : — I now write you a few lines to inform 
you of my fate. Yesterday at eight o'clock I was ordered 
to the President's and there, together with a Carolinian, Mid- 
dleton, was examined for Sophomore. When we were first 
ushered into their presence, they looked like so many judges 
of the Inquisition. We were ordered down into the parlour, 
almost frightened out of our wits, to be examined by each 
separately ; but we soon found them quite a pleasant sort of 
chaps. The President sent us down a good dish of pears, 
and treated us very much like gentlemen. It was not ended 
in the morning; but we returned in the afternoon when 
Professor Ware [the Hollis Professor of Divinity] examined 
us in Grotius'De Veritate. We found him very good-natured ; 
for I happened to ask him a question in theology, which 
made him laugh so that he was obliged to cover his face 
with his hand. At half past three our fate was decided and 
we were declared < Sophomores of Harvard University.' 

" As you would like to know how I appeared, I will give 
you the conversation verbatim with Mr. Frisbie when I went 
to see him after the examination. I asked him, ' Did 1 appear 
well in my examination?' Answer. * Yes.' Question. 
1 Did I appear very well, sir ? ' Answer. l Why are you so 
particular, young man ? Yes, you did yourself a great deal 
of credit,' I feel today twenty pounds lighter than I did 
yesterday. . . . Love to mother, whose affectionate son I 
remain, 

"Wm. Hickling Prescott." 



ii.] EARLY YEARS 27 

Prescott entered upon his college life in the autumn 
of this same year (1811). We find that many of those 
traits which he had exhibited in his early school days 
were now accentuated rather sharply. He was fond 
of such studies as appealed to his instinctive tastes. 
English literature and the literatures of Greece and 
Rome he studied willingly because he liked them and 
not because he was ambitious to gain high rank in the 
University. To this he was more or less indifferent, 
and, therefore, gave as little attention as possible to 
such subjects as mathematics, logic, the natural sciences, 
philosophy, and metaphysics, without which, of course, 
he could not hope to win university honours. Never- 
theless, he disliked to be rated below the average of 
his companions, and, therefore, he was careful not to 
fall beneath a certain rather moderate standard of 
excellence. He seems, indeed, to have adopted the 
Horatian aurea mediocritas as his motto ; and the easy- 
going, self-indulgent philosophy of Horace he made 
for the time his own. In fact, the ideal which he 
set before himself was the life of a gentleman in the 
traditional English meaning of that word ; and it was 
a gentleman's education and nothing more which he 
desired to attain. To be socially agreeable, courteous, 
and imbued with a liberal culture, seemed to him a 
sufficient end for his ambition. His father was wealthy 
and generous. He was himself extremely fond of the 
good things of life. He made friends readily, and had 
a very large share of personal attractiveness. Under 
the circumstances, it is not to be wondered at if his 
college life was marked by a pleasant, well-bred hedo- 
nism rather than by the austerity of the true New Eng- 
land temperament. The Prescotts as a family had 



28 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

some time before slipped away from the clutch of 
Puritanism and had accepted the mild and elastic 
creed of Channing, which, in its tolerant view of life, 
had more than a passing likeness to Episcopalianism. 
Prescott was still running over with youthful spirits, his 
position was an assured one, his means were ample, and 
his love of pleasure very much in evidence. We cannot 
wonder, then, if we find that in the early part of his uni- 
versity career he slipped into a sort of life which was 
probably less commendable than his cautious biogra- 
phers are willing to admit. Mr. Ticknor's very guarded 
intimations seem to imply in Prescott a considerable 
laxity of conduct ; and it is not unfair to read between 
the lines of what he has written and there find un- 
willing but undeniable testimony. Thus Ticknor 
remarks that Prescott " was always able to stop short 
of what he deemed flagrant excesses and to keep within 
the limits, though rather loose ones, which he had 
prescribed to himself. His standard for the character 
of a gentleman varied, no doubt, at this period, and 
sometimes was not so high on the score of morals as 
it should have been." Prescott is also described as 
never having passed the world's line of honour, but 
as having been willing to run exceedingly close to it. 
"He pardoned himself too easily for his manifold 
neglect and breaches of the compacts he had made 
with his conscience ; but there was repentance at the 
bottom of all." It is rather grudgingly admitted also 
that "the early part of his college career, when for 
the first time he left the too gentle restraints of his 
father's house, . . . was the most dangerous period of 
his life. Upon portions of it he afterwards looked 
back with regret." There is a good deal of significance, 



ii.] EAKLY YEARS 29 

moreover, in some sentences which Prescott himself 
wrote, long afterwards, of the temptations which assail 
a youth during those years when he has attained to 
the independence of a man but while he is still swayed 
by the irresponsibility of a boy. There seems to be in 
these sentences a touch of personal reminiscence and 
regret : — 

" The University, that little world of itself . . . bounding 
the visible horizon of the student like the walls of a monas- 
tery, still leaves within him scope enough for all the sym- 
pathies and the passions of manhood. . . . He meets with 
the same obstacles to success as in the world, the same temp- 
tations to idleness, the same gilded seductions, but without 
the same power of resistance. For in this morning of life 
his passions are strongest ; his animal nature is more sensi- 
ble to enjoyment; his reasoning faculties less vigorous and 
mature. Happy the youth who in this stage of his existence 
is so strong in his principles that he can pass through the 
ordeal without faltering or failing, on whom the contact of 
bad companionship has left no stain for future tears to wash 
away." 

Just how much is meant by this reluctant testimony 
can only be conjectured. It is not unfair, however, to 
assume that, for a time, Prescott's diversions were 
such as even a lenient moralist would think it neces- 
sary to condemn. The fondness for wine, which re- 
mained with him throughout his life, makes it likely 
that convival excess was one of his undergraduate 
follies ; while the flutter of a petticoat may at times 
have stirred his senses. No doubt many a young man 
in his college days has plunged far deeper into dissipa- 
tion than ever Prescott did and has emerged unscathed 
to lead a useful life. Yet in Prescott's case there 
existed a peculiar danger. His future did not call 



30 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

upon him to face the stern realities of a life of toil. 
He was assured of a fortune ample for his needs, and 
therefore his easy-going, pleasure-loving disposition, 
his boundless popularity, his handsome face, his exu- 
berant spirits, and his very moderate ambition might 
easily have combined to lead him down the primrose 
path where intellect is enervated and moral fibre 
irremediably sapped. 

One dwells upon this period of indolence and folly 
the more willingly, because, after all, it reveals to us 
in Prescott those pardonable human failings which 
only serve to make his character more comprehensible. 
Prescott's eulogists have so studiously ignored his 
weaknesses as to leave us with no clear-cut impression 
of the actual man. They have unwisely smoothed 
away so much and have extenuated so much in their 
halting and ambiguous phrases, as to create a picture 
of which the outlines are far too faint. Apparently, 
they wish to draw the likeness of a perfect being, and 
to that extent they have made the subject of their 
encomiums appear unreal. One cannot understand 
how truly lovable the actual Prescott was, without 
reconstructing him in such a way as to let his faults 
appear beside his virtues. Moreover, an understand- 
ing of the perils which at first beset him is needed in 
order to make clear the profound importance of an inci- 
dent which sharply called a halt to his excesses and, by 
curbing his wilful nature, set his finer qualities in the 
ascendant. It is only by remembering how far he 
might have fallen, that we can view as a blessing 
in disguise the blow which Pate was soon to deal 
him. 

In the second (Junior) year of his college life, he 



ii.] EARLY YEARS 81 

was dining one day with the other undergraduates in 
the Commons Hall. During these meals, so long as 
any college officers were present, decorum usually 
reigned ; but when the dons had left the room, the stu- 
dents frequently wound up by what, in modern student 
phrase, would be described as " rough-house." There 
were singing and shouting and frequently some bois- 
terous scuffling, such as is natural among a lot of 
healthy young barbarians. On this particular occa- 
sion, as Prescott was leaving the hall, he heard a 
sudden outbreak and looked around to learn its cause. 
Missiles were flying about ; and, just as he turned his 
head, a large hard crust of bread struck him squarely 
in the open eye. The shock was great, resembling a 
concussion of the brain, and Prescott fell unconscious. 
He was taken to his father's house, where, on recover- 
ing consciousness, he evinced extreme prostration, 
with nausea, a fluttering pulse, and all the evidences 
of physical collapse. So weak was he that he could 
not even sit upright in his bed. For several weeks 
unbroken rest was ordered, so that nature, aided by 
a vigorous constitution, might repair the injury which 
his system had sustained. When he returned to 
Cambridge, the sight of the injured eye (the left one) 
was gone forever. Oddly enough, in view of the 
severity of the blow, the organ was not disfigured, and 
only through powerful lenses could even the slightest 
difference be detected between it and the unhurt eye. 
Dr. James Jackson, who attended Prescott at this 
time, described the case as one of paralysis of the 
retina, for which no remedy was possible. This acci- 
dent, with the consequences which it entailed, was to 
have a profound effect not only upon the whole of 



32 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

Prescott's subsequent career, but upon his character 
as well. His affliction, indeed, is inseparably associ- 
ated with his work, and it must again and again be 
referred to, both because it was continually in his 
thoughts and because it makes the record of his lit- 
erary achievement the more remarkable. Incidentally, 
it afforded a revelation of one of Prescott's noblest 
traits, — his magnanimity. He was well aware of the 
identity of the person to whom he owed this physical 
calamity. Yet, knowing as he did that the whole 
thing was in reality an accident, he let it be supposed 
that he had no knowledge of the person and that the 
mishap had come about in such a way that the respon- 
sibility for it could not be fixed. As a matter of fact, 
the thing had been done unintentionally ; yet this can- 
not excuse its perpetrator for never expressing to 
Prescott his regret and sympathy. Years afterwards, 
Prescott spoke of this man to Ticknor in the kindest 
and most friendly fashion, and once he was able to con- 
fer on him a signal favour, which he did most readily 
and with sincere cordiality. 

Prescott returned to the University in a mood of 
seriousness, which showed forth the qualities inherited 
from his father. Hitherto he had been essentialty his 
mother's son, with all her gayety and mirthfulness 
and joy of life. Henceforth he was to exhibit more 
and more the strength of will and power of applica- 
tion which had made his father so honoured and so 
influential. Not that he let his grave misfortune cloud 
his spirits. He had still the use of his uninjured eye, 
and he had recovered from his temporary physical 
prostration ; but he now went about his work in a dif- 
ferent spirit, and was resolved to win at least an hon- 



ii.] EARLY YEARS 33 

ourable rank for scholarship. In the classics and in 
English he studied hard, and he overcame to some 
extent his aversion to philosophy and logic. Mathe- 
matics, however, still remained the bane of his aca- 
demic existence. For a time he used to memorise 
word for word all the mathematical demonstrations 
as he found them in the text-books, without the slight- 
est comprehension of what they meant; and his re- 
markable memory enabled him to reproduce them in 
the class room, so that the professor of mathematics 
imagined him to be a promising disciple. This fact 
does not greatly redound to the acumen of the pro- 
fessor nor to the credit of his class-room methods, 
and what followed gives a curious notion of the easy- 
going system which then prevailed. Prescott found 
the continual exertion of his memory a good deal of 
a bore. To his candid nature it also savoured of de- 
ception. He, therefore, very frankly explained to the 
professor the secret of his mathematical facility. He 
said that, if required, he would continue to memorise 
the work, but that he knew it to be for him nothing 
but a waste of time, and he asked, with much naivety 
that he might be allowed to use his leisure to better 
advantage. This most ingenuous request must have 
amused the gentleman of whom it was made ; but it 
proved to be effectual. Prescott was required to 
attend all the mathematical exercises conscientiously, 
but from that day he was never called upon to recite. 
For the rest, his diligence in those studies which he 
really liked won him the respect of the faculty at 
large. At graduation he received as a commencement 
honour the assignment of a Latin poem, which he duly 
declaimed to a crowded audience in the old " meeting- 



34 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

house" at Cambridge, in August, 1814. This poem 
was in Latin elegiacs, and was an apostrophe to Hope 
(Ad Spem), of which, unfortunately, no copy has been 
preserved. At the same time, Prescott was admitted 
to membership in the Phi Beta Kappa, from which a 
single blackball was sufficient to exclude a candidate. 
His father celebrated these double honours by giving 
an elaborate dinner, in a pavilion, to more than five 
hundred of the family's acquaintances. 

Prescott had now to make his choice of a profession ; 
for to a New Englander of those days every man, how- 
ever wealthy, was expected to have a definite occupa- 
tion. Very naturally he decided upon the law, and 
began the study of it in his father's office, though it 
was evident enough from the first that to his taste the 
tomes of Blackstone m&de no very strong appeal. He 
loved rather to go back to his classical reading and to 
enlarge his knowledge of modern literature. Indeed, 
his legal studies were treated rather cavalierly, and it 
is certain that had he ever been admitted to the bar, 
he would have found no pleasure in the routine of a 
lawyer's practice. Fate once more intervened, though, 
as before, in an unpleasant guise. In January, 1815, 
a painful inflammation appeared in his right eye — 
the one that had not been injured. This inflamma- 
tion increased so rapidly as to leave Prescott for the 
time completely blind. Nor was the disorder merely 
local. A fever set in with a high pulse and a general 
disturbance of the system. Prescott's suffering was 
intense for several days ; and at the end of a week, 
when the local inflammation had passed away, the 
retina of the right eye was found to be so seriously 
affected as to threaten a permanent loss of sight. 



ii] EAKLY YEARS 36 

At the same time, symptoms of acute rheumatism 
appeared in the knee-joints and in the neck. For 
several months the patient's condition was pitiable. 
Again and again there was a recurrence of the in- 
flammation in the eye, alternating with the rheumatic 
symptoms, so that for sixteen weeks Prescott was 
unable to leave his room, which had to be darkened al- 
most into blackness. Medical skill availed very little, 
and no doubt the copious blood-letting which was 
demanded by the practice of that time served only 
to deplete the patient's strength. Through all these 
weary months, however, Prescott bore his sufferings 
with indomitable courage, and to those friends of his 
who groped their way through the darkness to his 
bedside he was always cheerful, animated, and even 
gay, talking very little of his personal affliction and 
showing a hearty interest in the concerns of others. 
When autumn came it was decided that he should 
take a sea voyage, partly to invigorate his constitu- 
tion and partly to enable him to consult the most 
eminent specialists of France and England. First of 
all, however, he planned to visit his grandfather, Mr. 
Thomas Hickling, who, as has been already mentioned, 
was American consul at the island of St. Michael's 
in the Azores, where it was thought the mildness of 
the climate might prove beneficial. 

Prescott set out, on September 26th of the same year 
(1815), in one of the small sailing vessels which plied 
between Boston and the West African islands. The 
voyage occupied twenty-two days, during which time 
Prescott had a recurrence both of his rheumatic pains 
and of the inflammatory condition of his eye. His 
discomfort was enhanced by the wretchedness of his 



36 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

accommodations — a gloomy little cabin into which 
water continually trickled from the deck, and in which 
the somewhat fastidious youth was forced to live upon 
nauseous messes of rye pudding sprinkled with coarse 
salt. Cockroaches and other vermin swarmed about 
him ; and it must have been with keen pleasure that 
he exchanged this floating prison for the charming 
villa in the Azores, where his grandfather had made 
his home in the midst of groves and gardens, blooming 
with a semi-tropical vegetation. Mr. Hickling, during 
his long residence at St. Michael's, had married a 
Portuguese lady for his second wife, and his family 
received Prescott with unstinted cordiality. The 
change from the bleak shores of New England to the 
laurels and myrtles and roses of the Azores delighted 
Prescott, and so appealed to his sense of beauty that 
he wrote home long and enthusiastic letters. But his 
unstinted enjoyment of this Hesperian paradise lasted 
for little more than two short weeks. He had landed 
on the 18th of October, and by November 1st he had 
gone back to his old imprisonment in darkness, living 
on a meagre diet and smarting under the blisters 
which were used as a counter-irritant to the rheumatic 
inflammation. As usual, however, his cheerfulness 
was unabated. He passed his time in singing, in 
chatting with his friends, and in walking hundreds of 
miles around his darkened room. He remained in 
this seclusion from November to February, when his 
health once more improved ; and two months later, on 
the 8th of April, 1816, he took passage from St. 
Michael's for London. The sea voyage and its at- 
tendant discomforts had their usual effect, and during 
twenty-two out of the twenty-four days, to which his 



ii.] EARLY YEARS 37 

weary journey was prolonged, he was confined to his 
cabin. 

On reaching London his case was very carefully 
diagnosed by three of the most eminent English 
specialists, Dr. Farre, Sir William Adams, and Mr. 
(afterward Sir) Astley Cooper. Their verdict was • 
not encouraging, for they decided that no local treat- 
ment of his eyes could be of any particular advantage, 
and that the condition of the right eye would always 
depend very largely upon the general condition of his 
system. They prescribed for him, however, and he 
followed out their regimen with conscientious scrupu- 
losity. After a three months' stay in London, he 
crossed the Channel and took up his abode in Paris. 
In England, owing to his affliction, he had been able 
to do and see but little, because he was forbidden to 
leave his room after nightfall, and of course he could 
not visit the theatre or meet the many interesting per- 
sons to whom Mr. John Quincy Adams, then American 
Minister to England, offered to present him. Some- 
thing he saw of the art collections of London, and he 
was especially impressed by the Elgin Marbles and 
Raphael's cartoons. There was a touch of pathos in 
the wistful way in which he paused in the booksellers' 
shops and longingly turned over rare editions of the 
classics which it was forbidden him to read. " When 
I look into a Greek or Latin book," he wrote to his 
father, " I experience much the same sensation as does 
one who looks on the face of a dead friend, and the tears 
not infrequently steal into my eyes." In Paris he re- 
mained two months, and passed the following winter 
in Italy, making a somewhat extended tour, and visit- 
ing the most famous of the Italian cities in company 



38 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. ii. 

with an old schoolmate. Thence he returned to Paris, 
where once more he had a grievous attack of his 
malady ; and at last, in May of 1817, he again reached 
London, embarking not long after for the United 
States. Before leaving England on this second visit, 
he had explored Oxford and Cambridge, which in- 
terested him extremely, but which he was glad to 
leave in order to be once more at home. 



CHAPTER III 

THE CHOICE OF A CAREER 

Prescott's return to his home brought him face to 
face with the perplexing question of his future. Dur- 
ing his two years of absence this question must often 
have been forced upon his mind, especially during 
those weary weeks when the darkness of his sick-room 
and the lack of any mental diversion threw him in 
upon himself and left him often with his own thoughts 
for company. Even to his optimistic temperament 
the future may well have seemed a gloomy one. Half- 
blind and always dreading the return of a painful 
malady, what was it possible for him to do in the 
world whose stir and movement and boundless oppor- 
tunity had so much attracted him ? Must he spend 
his years as a recluse, shut out from any real share 
in the active duties of life ? Little as he was wont 
to dwell upon his own anxieties, he could not remain 
wholly silent concerning a subject so vital to his hap- 
piness. In a letter to his father, written from St. 
Michael's not long before he set out for London, he 
broached very briefly a subject that must have been 
very often in his thoughts. 

" The most unpleasant of my reflections suggested by this 
late inflammation are those arising from the probable necessity 
of abandoning a profession congenial with my taste and 
recommended by such favourable opportunities, and adopt- 



40 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

ing one for which I am ill qualified and have but little 
inclination. It is some consolation that this latter alterna- 
tive, should my eyes permit, will afford me more leisure for 
the pursuit of my favourite studies. But on this subject I 
shall consult my physician and will write you his opinion." 

Apparently at this time he still cherished the hope 
of entering upon some sort of a professional career, 
even though the practice of the law were closed to 
him. But after the discouraging verdict of the Lon- 
don specialists had been made known, he took a more 
despondent view. He wrote : — 

" As to the future, it is too evident I shall never be able to 
pursue a profession. God knows how poorly I am qualified 
and how little inclined to be a merchant. Indeed, I am 
sadly puzzled to think how I shall succeed even in this 
without eyes." 

It was in this uncertain state of mind that he re- 
turned home in the late summer of 1817. The warmth 
of the welcome which he received renewed his buoyant 
spirits, even though he soon found himself again pros- 
trated by a recurrence of his now familiar trouble. 
His father had leased a delightful house in the country 
for his occupancy ; but the shade-trees that surrounded 
it created a dampness which was unfavourable to a 
rheumatic subject, and so Prescott soon returned to 
Boston. Here he spent the winter in retirement, yet 
not in idleness. His love of books and of good litera- 
ture became the more intense in proportion as physi- 
cal activity was impossible; and he managed to get 
through a good many books, thanks to the kindness 
of his sister and of his former school companion, 
William Gardiner, both of whom devoted a part of 
each day to reading aloud to Prescott, — Gardiner the 



in.] THE CHOICE OF A CAREER 41 

classics, and Miss Prescott the standard English au- 
thors in history, poetry, and belles-lettres in general. 
These readings often occupied many consecutive hours, 
extending at times far into the night; and they re- 
lieved Prescott's seclusion of much of its irksomeness, 
while they stored his mind with interesting topics of 
thought. It was, in reality, the continuation of a 
system of vicarious reading which he had begun two 
years before in St. Michael's, where he had managed, 
by the aid of another's eyes, to enjoy the romances of 
Scott, which were then beginning to appear, and to 
renew his acquaintance with Shakespeare, Homer, and 
the Greek and Koman historians. 

From reading literature, it was a short step to 
attempting its production. Pledging his sister to se- 
crecy, Prescott composed and dictated to her an essay 
which was sent anonymously to the North American 
Review, then a literary fledgling of two years, but al- 
ready making its way to a position of authority. This 
little ballon d'essai met the fate of many such, for the 
manuscript was returned within a fortnight. Pres- 
cott's only comment was, " There ! I was a fool to send 
it ! " Yet the instinct to write was strong within him, 
and before very long was again to urge him with com- 
pelling force to test his gift. But meanwhile, finding 
that his life of quiet and seclusion did very little for 
his eyes, he made up his mind that he might just as 
well go out into the world more freely and mingle 
with the friends whose society he missed so much. 
After a little cautious experimenting, which appar- 
ently did no harm, he resumed the old life from which, 
for three years, he had been self-banished. The effect 
upon him mentally was admirable, and he was now 



42 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

safe from any possible danger of becoming morbidly 
introspective from the narrowness of his environ- 
ment. He went about freely all through the year 
1818, indulging in social pleasures with the keenest zest. 
His bent for literature, however, asserted itself in the 
foundation of a little society or club, whose members 
gathered informally, from time to time, for the reading 
of papers and for genial yet frank criticism of one 
another's productions. This club never numbered 
more than twenty-four persons, but they were all cul- 
tivated men, appreciative and yet discriminating, and 
the list of them contains some names, such as those of 
Franklin Dexter, Theophilus Parsons, John Ware, and 
Jared Sparks, which, like Prescott' s own, belong to the 
record of American letters. For their own amusement, 
they subsequently brought out a little periodical called 
The Club-Room, of which four numbers in all were 
published, 1 and to which Prescott, who acted as its 
editor, made three contributions, one of them a sort of 
humorous editorial article, very local in its interest, 
another a sentimental tale called " The Vale of Alle- 
rid," and the third a ghost story called " Calais." They 
were like thousands of such trifles which are written 
every year by amateurs, and they exhibit no literary 
qualities which raise them above the level of the com- 
monplace. The sole importance of The Club-Room's 
brief existence lies in the fact that it possibly did 
something to lure Prescott along the path that led to 
serious literary productiveness. 

One very important result of his return to social 
life was found in his marriage, in 1820, to Miss Susan 

1 The first number appeared in February, 1820 ; the last in July 
of the same year. 



in.] THE CHOICE OF A CAREER 43 

Amory, the daughter of Mr. Thomas C. Amory, a lead- 
ing merchant of Boston. 1 The bride was a very charming 
girl, to whom her young husband was passionately de- 
voted, and who filled his life with a radiant happiness 
which delighted all who knew and loved him. His 
naturally buoyant spirits rose to exuberance after his 
engagement. He forgot his affliction. He let his 
reading go by the board. He was, in fact, too happy 
for anything but happiness, and this delight even 
inspired him to make a pun that is worth recording. 
Prescott was an inveterate punster, and his puns were 
almost invariably bad ; but when his bachelor friends 
reproached him for his desertion of them, he laughed 
and answered them with the Vergilian line, — 

" Omnia vincit amor et nos cedamus Amori " — 

a play upon words which Thackeray independently 
chanced upon many years later in writing Pendennis, 
and & propos of a very different Miss Amory. It is of 
interest to recall the description given by Mr. Ticknor 
of Prescott as he appeared at the time of his marriage 
(May 4, 1820) and, indeed, very much as he remained 
down to the hour of his death. 

" My friend was one of the finest looking men I have ever 
seen ; or, if this should be deemed in some respects a strong 
expression, I shall be fully justified ... in saying that he 
was one of the most attractive. He was tall, well formed, 
manly in his bearing but gentle, with light brown hair that 

1 Her mother had been Miss Hannah Linzee, whose father, Cap- 
tain Linzee, of the British sloop-of-war Falcon, had tried by heavy 
cannonading to dislodge Colonel William Prescott from the redoubt 
at Bunker Hill. The swords of the two had been handed down in 
their respective families, and now found a peaceful resting-place in 
young Prescott's "den," where they hung crossed upon the wall 
above his books. 



44 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

was hardly changed or diminished by years, with a clear 
complexion and a ruddy flush on his cheek that kept for him 
to the last an appearance of comparative youth, but above 
all with a smile that was the most absolutely contagious I 
ever looked on. . . . Even in the last months of his life 
when he was in some other respects not a little changed, he 
appeared at least ten years younger than he really was. And 
as for the gracious sunny smile that seemed to grow sweeter 
as he grew older, it was not entirely obliterated even by the 
touch of death." 

After Prescott had been married for about a year, 
the old question of a life pursuit recurred and was 
considered by him seriously. Without any very defi- 
nite aim, yet with a half-unconscious intuition, he re- 
solved to store his mind with abundant reading, so that 
he might, at least in some way, be fitted for the career 
of a man of letters. Hitherto, in the desultory fashion 
of his boyhood, he had dipped into many authors, yet 
he really knew nothing thoroughly and well. In the 
classics he was perhaps best equipped ; but of English 
literature his knowledge was superficial because he had 
read only here and there, and rather for the pleasure 
of the moment than for intellectual discipline. He 
had a slight smattering of French, sufficient for the 
purposes of a traveller, but nothing more. Of Italian, 
Spanish, and German he was wholly ignorant, and 
with the literatures of these three languages he had 
never made even the slightest acquaintance. Conning 
over in a reflective mood the sum total of his acquisi- 
tions and defects, he came to the conclusion that he 
would undertake what he called in a memorandum "a 
course of studies/' including " the principles of gram- 
mar and correct writing" and the history of the 
North American Continent. He also resolved to de- 



in.] THE CHOICE OF A CAREER 45 

vote one hour a day to the Latin classics. Some six 
months after this, his purpose had expanded, and he 
made a second resolution, which he recorded in the 
following words : — 

" I am now twenty-six years of age, nearly. By the time I 
am thirty, God willing, I propose with what stock I have 
already on hand to be a very well read English scholar ; to 
be acquainted with the classical and useful authors, prose 
and poetry, in Latin, French, and Italian, and especially in 
history — I do not mean a critical or profound acquaintance. 
The two following years I may hope to learn German, and 
to have read the classical German writers ; and the transla- 
tions, if my eye continues weak, of the Greek." 

To this memorandum he adds the comment that 
such a course of study would be sufficient " for gen- 
eral discipline " — a remark which proves that he had 
not as yet any definite plan in undertaking his self- 
ordered task. For several years he devoted himself 
with great industry to the course which he had 
marked out. He went back to the pages of Blair's 
Ehetoric and to Lindley Murray's Grammar, and he 
read consecutively, making notes as he read, the older 
masters of English prose style from Eoger Ascham, 
Sidney, Bacon, and Raleigh down to the authors of 
the eighteenth century, and even later. In Latin he 
reviewed Tacitus, Livy, and Cicero. His reading 
seems to have been directed less to the subject- 
matter than to the understanding and appreciation 
of style as a revelation of the writer's essential 
characteristics. It was, in fact, a study of psychol- 
ogy quite as much as a study of literature. Passing 
on to French, he found the literature of that language 
comparatively unsympathetic, and he contrasted it un- 



46 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

favourably with the English. He derived some pleas- 
ure from the prose of Montaigne and Bossuet, and from 
Corneille and Moliere ; but, on the whole, French poetry 
always seemed to him too rigid in its formal classicism 
to be enjoyable. Side by side with his French reading, 
he made the acquaintance of the early English ballad- 
poetry and the old romances, and, in 1823, he took up 
Italian, which appealed to him intensely, so that he 
read an extraordinary amount and made the most 
voluminous notes upon every author that interested 
him, besides writing long criticisms and argumenta- 
tive letters to his friend Ticknor, full of praises of 
Petrarch and Dante, and defending warmly the real 
existence of Laura and the genuineness of Dante's 
passion for Beatrice. For Dante, indeed, Prescott 
conceived a most enthusiastic admiration, which found 
expression in many a letter to his friend. 

The immediate result of his Italian studies was the 
preparation of some articles which were published in 
the North American Review — the first on Italian nar- 
rative poetry (October, 1824). This was the begin- 
ning of a series ; since, nearly every year thereafter, 
some paper from his pen appeared in that publication. 
One article on Italian poetry and romance was origi- 
nally offered to the English Quarterly Review through 
Jared Sparks, and was accepted by the editor ; but 
Prescott, growing impatient over the delay in its ap- 
pearance, recalled the manuscript and gave it to the 
North American. These essays of Prescott were not 
rated very highly by their author, and we can accept 
his own estimate as, on the whole, a just one. They 
are written in an urbane and agreeable manner, but 
are wholly lacking in originality, insight, and vigour ; 



in.] THE CHOICE OF A CAREER 47 

while their bits of learning strike the more modern 
reader as old fashioned, even if not pedantic. This 
literary work, however, slight as may be its intrinsic 
merit, was at least an apprenticeship in letters, and 
gave to Prescott a useful training in the technique of 
composition. 

In 1824, something of great moment happened in 
the course of Prescott's search for a life career. He 
had, in accordance with the resolution already men- 
tioned, taken up the study of German ; but he found 
it not only difficult but, to him, uninteresting. After 
several months he became discouraged; and though 
he read on, he did so, as he himself has recorded, with 
no method and with very little diligence or spirit. Just 
at this time Mr. George Ticknor, who had been deliver- 
ing a course of lectures in Harvard on the subject of 
Spanish literature, read over some of these lectures to 
Prescott, merely to amuse him and to divert his mind. 
The immediate result was that Prescott resolved to 
give up his German studies and to substitute a course 
in Spanish. On the first day of December, 1824, he 
employed a teacher of that language, and commenced 
a course of study which was to prove wonderfully 
fruitful, and which ended only with his life. He 
seems to have begun the reading of Spanish from 
the very moment that he took up the study of its 
grammar, and there is an odd significance in a re- 
mark which he wrote down only a few days after : 
" I snatch a fraction of the morning from the inter- 
esting treatise of M. Josse on the Spanish language 
and from the Conquista de Mexico, which, notwith- 
standing the time I have been upon it, I am far 
from having conquered." The deadening effects of 



48 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

German upon his mind seem to have endured for 
a while, since at Christmas time he was still pur- 
suing his studies with a certain listlessness ; and he 
wrote to Bancroft, the historian, a letter which con- 
tained one remark that is very curious when we read 
it in the light of his subsequent career : — 

" I am battling with the Spaniards this winter, but I have 
not the heart for it as I had for the Italians. / doubt 
whether there are many valuable things that the key of know- 
ledge will unlock in that language." 

Another month, however, found him filled with the 
joy of one who has at last laid his hand upon that for 
which he has long been groping. He expressed this 
feeling very vividly in a letter quoted by Mr. Ticknor : — 

"Did you never, in learning a language, after groping 
about in the dark for a long while, suddenly seem to turn an 
angle where the light breaks upon you all at once ? The 
knack seems to have come to me within the last fortnight in 
the same manner as the art of swimming comes to those who 
have been splashing about for months in the water in vain." 

Spanish literature exercised upon his mind a peculiar 
charm, and he boldly dashed into the writing of Spanish 
even from the first. Ticknor's well-stored library sup- 
plied him with an abundance of books, and his own 
comments upon the Castilian authors in whom he rev- 
elled were now written not in English but in Spanish 
— naturally the Spanish of a beginner, yet with a feel- 
ing for idiom which greatly surprised Ticknor. Even 
in after years, Prescott never acquired a faultless Span- 
ish diction ; but he wrote with clearness and fluency, 
so that his Spanish was very individual, and, in this 
respect, not unlike the Latin of Politian or of Milton. 

Up to this time Prescott had been cultivating his 



in] THE CHOICE OF A CAREER 49 

mind and storing it with knowledge withont having 
formed any clear conception of what he was to do 
with his intellectual accumulations. At first, when he 
formed a plan of systematic study, his object had 
been only the modest one of " general discipline," as 
he expressed it. As he went on, however, he seems 
to have had an instinctive feeling that even without 
intention he was moving toward a definite goal. Just 
what this was he did not know, but none the less 
he was not without faith that it would ultimately be 
revealed to him. Looking back over all the memo- 
randa that he has left behind, it is easy now to see that 
his drift had always been toward historical investiga- 
tion. His boyish tastes, already described, declared his 
interest in the lives of men of action. His maturer 
preferences pointed in the same direction. It has here- 
tofore been noted that, in 1821, when he marked out 
for himself his first formal plan of study, he included 
" the compendious history of North America " as one 
of the subjects. While reading French he had dwelt 
especially upon the chroniclers and historians from 
Froissart down. In Spanish he had been greatly at- 
tracted by Mariana's Historia de EspaTicij which is still 
one of the Castilian classics ; and this work had led 
him to the perusal of Mably's acute and philosophi- 
cal Etude de VHistoire. He himself long afterward 
explained that still earlier than this he had been 
strongly attracted to historical writing, especially 
after reading Gibbon's Autobiography, which he came 
upon in 1820. Even then, he tells us, he had pro- 
posed to himself to become an historian "in the best 
sense of the term." About 1822 he jotted down the 
following in his private notes : — 



60 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

" History has always been a favourite study with me and I 
have long looked forward to it as a subject on which I was 
one day to exercise my pen. It is not rash, in the dearth 
of well-written American history, to entertain the hope of 
throwing light upon this matter. This is my hope." 

Nevertheless, although, his bent was so evidently for 
historical composition, he had as yet received no im- 
pulse toward any especial department of that field. 
In October, 1825, we find him making this confession 
of his perplexity : " I have been so hesitating and re- 
flecting upon what I shall do, that I have in fact done 
nothing." And five days later, he set down the follow- 
ing : " I have passed the last fortnight in examination 
of a suitable subject for historical composition." In 
his case there was no need for haste. He realised that 
historical research demands maturity of mind. "I 
think," he said, "thirty-five years of age full soon 
enough to put pen to paper." And again : " I care not 
how long a time I take for it, provided I am diligent 
in all that time." 

It is clear from one of the passages just quoted, 
that his first thought was to choose a distinctively 
American theme. This, however, he put aside without 
any very serious consideration, although he had looked 
into the material at hand and had commented upon its 
richness. His love of Italian literature and of Italy 
drew him strongly to an Italian theme, and for a while 
he thought of preparing a careful study of that great 
movement which transformed the republic of ancient 
Rome into an empire. Again, still with Italy in 
mind, he debated with himself the preparation of a 
work on Italian literature, — a work (to use his own 
words) " which, without giving a chronological and 



in] THE CHOICE OF A CAREER 51 

minute analysis of authors, should exhibit in masses 
the most important periods, revolutions, and characters 
in the history of Italian letters." Further reflection, 
however, led him to reject this, partly because it would 
involve so extensive and critical a knowledge of all 
periods of Italian literature, and also because the sub- 
ject was not new, having in a way been lately treated 
by Sismondi. Prescott makes another and very char- 
acteristic remark, which shows him to have been then 
as always the man of letters as well as the historian, 
with a keen eye to what is interesting. "Literary 
history," he says, " is not so amusing as civil." 

The choice of a Spanish subject had occurred to him 
in a casual way soon after he had taken up the study 
of the Spanish language. In a letter already quoted as 
having been written in December of 1825, he balances 
such a theme with his project for a Eoman one : — 

" I have been hesitating between two topics for historical 
investigation — Spanish history from the invasion of the 
Arabs to the consolidation of the monarchy under Charles 
V., or a history of the revolution of ancient Rome which 
converted the republic into an empire. . . . I shall probably 
select the first as less difficult of execution than the second." 

He also planned a collection of biographical sketches 
and criticisms, but presently rejected that, as he did, a 
year later, the Eoman subject; and after having done 
so, the mists began to clear away and a great pur- 
pose to take shape before his mental vision. On Janu- 
ary 8, 1826, he wrote a long memorandum which 
represents the focussing of his hitherto vague mental 
strivings. 

"Cannot I contrive to embrace the gist of the Spanish 
subject without involving myself in the unwieldy barbarous 



52 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

records of a thousand years? What new and interesting 
topic may be admitted — not forced — into the reigns of 
Ferdinand and Isabella? Can I not indulge in a retrospec- 
tive picture of the constitutions of Castile and Aragon — 
of the Moorish dynasties and the causes of their decay and 
dissolution? Then I have the Inquisition with its bloody 
persecutions ; the conquest of Granada, a brilliant passage ; 
the exploits of the Great Captain in Italy ; . . . the discov- 
ery of a new world, my own country. ... A biography 
will make me responsible for a limited space only ; will re- 
quire much less reading ; will offer the deeper interest which 
always attaches to minute developments of character, and 
the continuous, closely connected narratives. The subject 
brings me to a point whence [modern] English history has 
started, is untried ground, and in my opinion a rich one. 
The age of Ferdinand is most important. ... It is in every 
respect an interesting and momentous period of history ; the 
materials authentic, ample. I will chew upon this matter 
and decide this week." 

Long afterward (in 1847) Prescott pencilled upon 
this memorandum the words : " This was the first germ 
of my conception of Ferdinand and Isabella." On 
January 19th, after some further wavering, he wrote 
down definitely : " I subscribe to the History of the 
Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella." Opposite this note 
he made, in 1847, the brief but emphatic comment, — 
" A fortunate choice. " 

From this decision he never retreated, though at 
times he debated with himself the wisdom of his 
choice. His apparent vacillation was due to a return 
of the inflammation in his eye. For a little while this 
caused him to shrink back from the difficulties of his 
Spanish subject, involving as it did an immense 
amount of reading ; and there came into his head the 
project of writing an historical survey of English lit- 
erature. But on the whole he held fast to his original 



in ] THE CHOICE OF A CAREER 53 

resolution, and soon entered upon that elaborate prep- 
aration which was to give to American literature 
a masterpiece. In his final selection of a theme we 
can, indeed, discern the blending of several currents 
of reflection and the combination of several of his 
earlier purposes. Though his book was to treat of 
two Spanish sovereigns, it nevertheless related to a 
reign whose greatest lustre was conferred upon it by 
an Italian and by the discovery of the Western World. 
Thus Prescott's early predilection for American history, 
his love for Italy, and his new-born interest in Spain 
were all united to stimulate him in the task upon 
which he had now definitely entered. 



CHAPTER IV 

SUCCESS 

Dr. Johnson, in his rather unsympathetic life of 
Milton, declares that it is impossible for a blind man 
to write history. Already, before Prescott began his- 
torical composition, this dictum had been refuted by 
the brilliant French historian, Augustin Thierry, 
whose scholarly study of the Merovingian period was 
composed after he had wholly lost his sight. 1 More- 
over, Prescott was not wholly blind, for at times he 
could make a cautious use of the right eye. Never- 
theless, the task to which he had set himself was suffi- 
ciently formidable to deter a less persistent spirit. In 
the first place, all the original sources of information 
were on the other side of the Atlantic. Nowhere in 
the United States was there a public library such as 
even some of our smaller cities now possess. Prescott 
himself, moreover, had at this time done comparatively 
little special reading in the subject of which he pro- 
posed to write; and the skilled assistance which he 
might easily have secured in Europe was not to be had 
in the United States. Finally, though he was not 
blind in the ordinary sense, he could not risk a total 
loss of sight by putting upon his remaining eye the 
strain of continuous and fatiguing use. 

1 Professor Jameson mentions two other contemporary instances, 
— Karl Szaynocha and Prescott's Florentine correspondent, the 
Marquis Gino Capponi. 



chap, it.] SUCCESS 65 

In spite of all these obstacles and discouragements, 
however, he began his undertaking with a touch of 
that stoicism which, as Thomas Hughes has some- 
where said, makes the Anglo-Saxon find his keenest 
pleasure in enduring and overcoming. Prescott had 
planned to devote a year to preliminary studies be- 
fore putting pen to paper. The work which he then 
had in mind was intended by him to be largely one of 
compilation from the works of foreign writers, to be of 
moderate size, with few pretensions to originality, and 
to claim attention chiefly because the subject was still 
a new one to English readers. He felt that he would 
be accomplishing a great deal if he should read 
and thoroughly digest the principal French, Spanish, 
and Italian historians — Mariana, Llorente, Varillas, 
Flechier, and Sismondi — and give a well-balanced 
account of Ferdinand and Isabella's reign based upon 
what these and a few other scholarly authorities had 
written. But the zeal of the investigator soon had him 
in its grip. Scarcely had the packages of books which 
he had ordered from Madrid begun to reach his library 
than his project broadened out immensely into a work 
of true creative scholarship. His year of reading now 
appeared to him absurdly insufficient. It had, indeed, 
already been badly broken into by one of his inflam- 
matory attacks ; and his progress was hampered by 
the inadequate assistance which he received. A 
reader, employed by him to read aloud the Spanish 
books, performed the duty valiantly but without under- 
standing a single word of Spanish, very much as Mil- 
ton's daughters read Greek and Hebrew to their 
father. Thinking of his new and more ambitious con- 
ception of his purpose and of the hindrances which 



56 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

beset him, Prescott wrote : " Travelling at this lame 
gait, I may yet hope in five or six years to reach 
the goal." As a matter of fact, it was three years and 
a half before he wrote the opening sentence of his 
book. It was ten years before he finished the last 
foot-note of the final chapter. It was nearly twelve 
years before the book was given to the public. 

Some account of his manner of working may be of 
interest, and it is convenient to describe it here once for 
all. In the second year, after he had begun his prelim- 
inary studies, he secured the services of a Mr. James 
English, a young Harvard graduate, who had some 
knowledge of the modern languages. This gentleman 
devoted himself to Prescott' s interests, and henceforth 
a definite routine of study and composition was es- 
tablished and was continued with other secretaries 
throughout Prescott's life. Mr. English has left some 
interesting notes of his experiences, which admit us to 
the library of the large house on Bedford Street, where 
the two men worked so diligently together. It was a 
spacious room in the back of the house, lined on two 
sides with books which reached the ceiling. Against 
a third side was a large green screen, toward which 
Prescott faced while seated at his table ; while behind 
him was an ample window, over which a series of pale 
blue muslin shades could be drawn, thus regulating the 
illumination of the room according to the state of 
Prescott's eye and the conditions of the weather. 
At a second window sat Mr. English, ready to act 
either as reader or as amanuensis when required. 

Allusion has been made from time to time to Pres- 
cott's written memoranda and to his letters, which, 
indeed, were often very long and very frequent. It 



iv.] SUCCESS 57 

must not be thought that in writing these he had to 
make any use of his imperfect sight. The need of 
this had been obviated by an invention which he had 
first heard of in London during his visit there in 1816. 
It was a contrivance called u the noctograph," meant 
for the use of the blind. A frame like that of a slate 
was crossed by sixteen parallel wires fastened into 
the sides and holding down a sheet of blackened 
paper like the carbon paper now used in typewriters 
and copying-machines. Under this blackened paper 
was placed a sheet of plain white note-paper. A per- 
son using the noctograph wrote with a sort of stylus 
of ivory, agate, or some other hard substance upon the 
blackened paper, which conveyed the impression to 
the white paper underneath. Of course, the brass 
wires guided the writers hand and kept the point 
of the stylus somewhere near the line. 1 

Of his noctograph Prescott made constant use. For 
composition he employed it almost altogether, seldom 
or never dictating to a scribe. Obviously, however, the 
instrument allowed no erasures or corrections to be 
made, and the writer must go straight forward with 
his task ; since to go back and try to alter what had 
been once set down would make the whole illegible. 
Hence arose the necessity of what Irving once de- 
scribed as " pre-thinking," — the determination not 
only of the content but of the actual form of the sen- 
tence before it should be written down. In this pre- 
thinking Prescott showed a power of memory and of 

1 Prescott owned two noctographs, but did nearly all of his writ- 
ing with one, keeping the other in reserve in case the first should 
suffer accident. One of these two implements is preserved in the 
Massachusetts Historical Societv. 



68 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

visualisation that was really wonderful. To carry in 
his mind the whole of what had been read over to him 
in a session of several hours, — names, dates, facts, 
authorities, — and then to shape his narrative, sen- 
tence by sentence, before setting down a word, and, 
finally, to bear in mind the whole structure of each 
succeeding paragraph and the form in which they had 
been carefully built up — this was, indeed, an intellec- 
tual and literary achievement of an unusual character. 
Of course, such a power as this did not come of itself, 
but was slowly gained by persistent practice and un- 
wearied effort. His personal memoranda show this : 
" Think closely," he writes, " gradually concentrating 
the circle of thought." And again : " Think continu- 
ously and closely before taking up my pen. Make cor- 
rections chiefly in my own mind." And still again : 
" Never take up my pen until I have travelled over 
the subject so often that I can write almost from 
memory." 

But in 1827, the time had not yet come for compo- 
sition. He was hearing books read to him and "was 
taking copious notes. How copious these were, his dif- 
ferent secretaries have told ; and besides, great masses 
of them have been preserved as testimony to the minute 
and patient labour of the man who made and used 
them. As his reader went on, Prescott would say, 
" Mark that ! " whenever anything seemed to him espe- 
cially significant. These marked passages were later 
copied out in a large clear hand for future reference. 
When the time came, they would be read, studied, 
compared, verified, and digested. Sometimes he spent 
as much as five days in thus mastering the notes col- 
lected for a single chapter. Then at least another day 



iv.] SUCCESS 69 

would be given to reflection and (probably) to com- 
position, while from five to nine days more might go 
to the actual writing out of the text. This power of 
Prescott's increased with constant exercise. Later, he 
was able to carry in his head the whole of the first and 
second chapters of his Conquest of Peru (nearly sixty 
pages) before committing them to paper, and in pre- 
paring his last work, Philip II, he composed and memo- 
rised the whole fifth, sixth, and seventh chapters of 
Book II., amounting to seventy-two printed pages. 

Prescott had elaborated a system of his own for the 
regulation of his daily life while he was working. 
This system was based upon the closest observation, 
extending over years, of the physical effect upon him 
of everything he did. The result was a regimen which 
represented his customary mode of living. Eising 
early in the morning, he took outdoor exercise, except 
during storms of exceptional severity. He rode well 
and loved a spirited horse, though sometimes he got a 
fall from letting his attention stray to his studies in- 
stead of keeping it on the temper of his animal. But, 
in the coldest weather, on foot or in the saddle, he cov- 
ered several miles before breakfast, to which he always 
came back in high spirits, having, as he expressed it, 
" wound himself up for the day." After a very simple 
breakfast, he went at once to his library, where, for an 
hour or so, he chatted with Mrs. Prescott or had her 
read to him the newspapers or some popular book of 
the day. By ten o'clock, serious work began with the 
arrival of his secretary, with whom he worked dili- 
gently until one o'clock, for he seldom sat at his desk 
for more than three consecutive hours. A brisk walk 
of a mile or two gave him an appetite for dinner, which 



60 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

was served at three o'clock, an hour which, in the year 
1827, was not regarded as remarkable, at least in Mas- 
sachusetts. This was a time of relaxation, of chat and 
gossip and family fun ; and it was then that Prescott 
treated himself to the amount of wine which he had 
decided to allow himself. His fondness for wine has 
been already casually mentioned. To him the question 
of its use was so important, that once, for two years 
and nine months, he recorded every day the exact 
amount that he had drunk and the effect which it had 
had upon his eye and upon his general health. A fur- 
ther indulgence which followed after dinner was the 
smoking of a mild cigar while his wife read or talked 
to him. Then, another walk or drive, a cup of tea at 
five, and finally, two or more industrious hours with his 
secretary, after which he came down to the library and 
enjoyed the society of his family or of friends who 
happened in. 

This, it will be seen, was not the life of a recluse or 
of a Casaubon, though it was a life regulated by a 
wise discretion. To adjust himself to its routine, 
Prescott had to overcome many of his natural tenden- 
cies. In the first place, he was, as has been already 
noted, of a somewhat indolent disposition ; and a steady 
grind, day after day and week after week, was some- 
thing which he had never known in school or college. 
Even now in his maturity, and with the spurring of 
a steady purpose to urge him on, he often faltered. 
His memoranda show now and then a touch of self- 
accusation or regret. 

" I have worked lazily enough, or rather have been too 
busy to work at all. Ended the old year very badly." 

" I find it as hard to get under way, as a crazy hulk that 
has been boarded up for repairs." 



iv.] SUCCESS 61 

How thoroughly he conquered this repugnance to 
hard work is illustrated by a pathetic incident which 
happened once when he was engaged upon a bit of 
writing that interested him, but when he was prevented 
by rheumatic pains from sitting upright. Prescott 
then placed his noctograph upon the floor and lay 
down flat beside it, writing in this attitude for many 
hours on nine consecutive days rather than give in. 

He tried some curious devices to penalise himself 
for laziness. He used to persuade his friends to make 
bets with him that he would not complete certain 
portions of writing within a given time. This sort 
of thing was a good deal of a make-believe, for Pres- 
cott cared nothing about money and had plenty of 
it at his disposal ; and when his friends lost, he never 
permitted them to pay. He did a like thing on a 
larger scale and in a somewhat different way by giv- 
ing a bond to his secretary, Mr. English, binding him- 
self to pay a thousand dollars if within one year from 
September, 1828, Prescott should not have written two 
hundred and fifty pages of Ferdinand and Isabella. 
This number of pages was specified, because Prescott 
dreaded his own instability of purpose, and felt 
that if he should once get so far as two hundred and 
fifty pages, he would be certain to go on and finish 
the entire history. Other wagers or bonds with Mr. 
English were made by Prescott from time to time, all 
with the purpose of counteracting his own disposition 
to far niente. 

His settled mode of life also compelled him in some 
measure to give up the delights of general social 
intercourse and the convivial pleasures of which 
he was naturally fond. There were, indeed, times 



62 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

when he did let his work go and enjoyed a return to 
a freer life, as when in the country at Pepperell he 
romped and rollicked like a boy ; or when in Boston, 
he was present at some of the jolly little suppers 
given by his friends and so much liked by him. But 
on the whole, neither his health nor the arduous re- 
searches which he had undertaken allowed him often 
to break the regularity of his way of living. Nothing, 
indeed, testifies more strikingly to his naturally buoy- 
ant disposition than the fact that years of unvarying 
routine were unable to make of Prescott a formalist 
or to render him less charming as a social favourite. 
In his study he was conspicuously the scholar, the 
investigator; elsewhere he was the genial companion, 
full of fun and jest, telling stories and manifesting 
that gift of personal attractiveness which compelled 
all within its range to feel wholly and completely at 
their ease. No writer was ever less given to literary pos- 
ing. It is, indeed, an extraordinary fact that although 
Prescott was occupied for ten whole years in preparing 
his Ferdinand and Isabella, during all that time not 
more than three persons outside of his own family 
knew that he was writing a book. His friends sup- 
posed that his hours of seclusion were occupied in 
general reading and study. Only when a formal 
announcement of the history was made in the North 
American Review in 1837, did even his familiar associ- 
ates begin to think of him as an author. 

The death of Prescott's little daughter, Catherine, 
in February, 1829, did much to drive him to hard 
work as a relief from sorrow. She was his first-born 
child, and when she died, she was a few months over 
four years of age, — a winsome little creature, upon 



iv.] SUCCESS 63 

whom her father had lavished an unstinted affection. 
She alone had the privilege of interrupting him 
during his hours of work. Often she used to climb 
up to his study and put an end to the most profound 
researches, greatly, it is recorded, to the delight of 
his secretary, who thus got a little moment of relief 
from the deciphering of almost undecipherable scrawls. 
Her death was sudden, and the shock of it was there- 
fore all the greater. Years afterward, Prescott, in 
writing to a friend who had suffered a like bereavement, 
disclosed the depths of his own anguish : " I can never 
suffer again as I then did. It was my first heavy 
sorrow, and I suppose we cannot twice feel so bit- 
terly." His labour now took on the character of 
a solace, and perhaps it was at this time that he 
formed the opinion which he set down long after : " I 
am convinced that intellectual occupation — steady, 
regular, literary occupation — is the true vocation for 
me, indispensable to my happiness." 

And so his preparation for Ferdinand and Isabella 
went on apace. Prescott no longer thought it enough 
to master the historians who had already written of 
this reign. He went back of them to the very Quellen, 
having learned that the true historical investigator can 
afford to slight no possible source of information, — 
that nothing, good, bad, or indifferent, can safely be 
neglected. The packets which now reached him from 
Spain and France grew bulkier and their contents 
more diversified. Not merely modern tomes, not 
merely printed books were there, but parchments in 
quaint and crabbed script, to be laboriously deciphered 
by his secretary, with masses of black-letter and cop- 
ies of ancient archives, from which some precious fact 



64 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

or chance corroboration might be drawn by inquisitive 
industry. The sifting out of all this rubbish-heap 
went on with infinite patience, until at last his notes 
and memoranda contained the substance of all that 
was essential. 

Prescott had given a bond to Mr. English pledging 
himself to complete by September, 1829, two hundred 
and fifty printed pages of the book. Yet it was actu- 
ally not until this month had ended that the first line 
was written. On October 6, 1829, after three months 
devoted to reviewing his notes for the opening chap- 
ter, he took his noctograph and scrawled the initial 
sentence. A whole month was consumed in finishing 
the chapter, and two months more in writing out the 
second and the third. From this time a sense of 
elation filled him, now that all his patient labour was 
taking concrete form, and there was no more question 
of putting his task aside. His progress might be, as 
he called it, " tortoise-like," but he had felt the joy of 
creation; and the work went on, always with a firmer 
grasp, a surer sense of form, and the clearer light 
which comes to an artist as his first vague impressions 
begin under his hand to take on actuality. There 
were times when, from illness, he had almost to cease 
from writing ; there were other times when he turned 
aside from his special studies to accomplish some 
casual piece of literary work. But these interruptions, 
while they delayed the accomplishment of his purpose, 
did not break the current of his interest. 

The casual pieces of writing, to which allusion has 
just been made, were oftenest contributions to the 
North American Review. One of them, however, was 
somewhat more ambitious than a magazine article. 



iv.] SUCCESS 65 

It was a life of Charles Brockden Brown, which Pres- 
cott undertook at the request of Jared Sparks, who 
was editing a series of American biographies. This 
was in 1834, and the book was written in two weeks 
at Nahant. It certainly did nothing for Prescott's 
reputation. What is true of this is true of everything 
that he wrote outside of his histories. In his essays, 
and especially in his literary criticisms, he seemed 
devoid of penetration and of a grasp upon the verities. 
His style, too, in all such work was formal and inert. 
He often showed the extent of his reading, but never 
an intimate feeling for character. He could not get 
down to the very core of his subject and weigh and 
judge with the freedom of an independent critic. His 
life of Brown will be found fully to bear out this view. 
In it Prescott chooses to condone the worst of Brown's 
defects, and he gives no intimation of the man's real 
power. Prescott himself felt that he had been too 
eulogistic, whereas his greatest fault was that the 
eulogy was misapplied. Sparks mildly criticised the 
book for its excess of generalities and its lack of con- 
crete facts. 

How thoroughly Prescott prepared himself for the 
writing of his book reviews may be seen in the fact that, 
having been asked for a notice of Conde's History 
of the Arabs in Spain, he spent from three to four 
months in preliminary reading, and then occupied 
nearly three months more in writing out the article. 
In this particular case, however, he felt that the 
paper represented too much labour to be sent to the 
North American, and therefore it was set aside and 
ultimately made into a chapter of his Ferdinand and 
Isabella. 



66 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

It was on the 25th of June, 1836, that his history- 
was finished, and he at once began to consider the 
question of its publication. Three years before, he 
had had the text set up in type so far as it was then 
completed; and as the work went on, this private 
printing continued until, soon after he had reached 
the end, four copies of the book were in his hands. 
These printed copies had been prepared for several 
reasons. First of all, the sight of his labour thus 
taking concrete form was a continual stimulus to him. 
He was still, so far as the public was concerned, a 
young author, and he felt all of the young author's joy 
in contemplating the printed pages of his first real 
book. In the second place, he wished to make a 
number of final alterations and corrections ; and every 
writer of experience is aware that the last subtle 
touches can be given to a book only when it is actually 
in type, for only then can he see the workmanship as it 
really is, with its very soul exposed to view, seen 
as the public will see it, divested of the partial 
nebulosity which obscures the vision while it still 
remains in manuscript. Finally, Prescott wished to 
have a printed copy for submission to the English 
publishers. It was his earnest hope to have the book 
appear simultaneously in England and America, since 
on the other side of the Atlantic, rather than in the 
United States, were to be found the most competent 
judges of its worth. 

But the search for an English publisher was at first 
unsuccessful. Murray rejected it without even look- 
ing at it. The Longmans had it carefully examined, 
but decided against accepting it. Prescott was hurt 
by this rejection, the more so as he thought (quite 



iv] SUCCESS 67 

incorrectly, as he afterward discovered) that it was 
Southey who had advised the Longmans not to publish 
it. The fact was that both of the firms just mentioned 
had refused it because their lists were then too full to 
justify them in undertaking a three-volume history. 
Prescott, for a time, experienced some hesitation in 
bringing it out at all. He had written on the day of its 
completion : " I should feel not only no desire, but a 
reluctance to publish, and should probably keep it by 
me for emendations and additions, were it not for the 
belief that the ground would be more or less occupied 
in the meantime by abler writers." The allusion here 
is to a history of the Spanish Arabs announced by 
Southey. But what really spurred Prescott on to give 
his book to the world was a quiet remark of his 
father's, in which there was something of a challenge 
and a taunt. " The man," said he, " who writes a book 
which he is afraid to publish is a coward." " Coward " 
was a name which no true Prescott could endure; 
and so, after some months of negotiation and reflection, 
an arrangement was made to have the history appear 
with the imprint of a newly founded publishing house, 
the American Stationers' Company of Boston, with 
which Prescott signed a contract in April, 1837. By 
the terms of this contract Prescott was to furnish the 
plates and also the engravings for the book, of which 
the company was to print 1250 copies and to have five 
years in which to sell them — surely a very modest 
bargain. But Prescott cared little for financial profits, 
nor was he wholly sanguine of the book's success. 
On the day after signing the contract, he wrote : " I 
must confess I feel some disquietude at the prospect of 
coming in full bodily presence before the public." And 



C8 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

somewhat earlier he had written with a curious though 
genuine humility : — 

" What do I expect from it, now it is done ? And may it 
not be all in vain and labour lost, after all ? My expectations 
are not such, if I know myself, as to expose me to any 
serious disappointment. I do not natter myself with the idea 
that I have achieved anything very profound, or, on the 
other hand, that will be very popular. I know myself too 
well to suppose the former for a moment. I know the 
public too well, and the subject I have chosen, to expect the 
latter. But I have made a book illustrating an unexplored 
and important period, from authentic materials, obtained 
with much difficulty, and probably in the possession of no 
one library, public or private, in Europe. As a plain, vera- 
cious record of facts, the work, therefore, till some one else 
shall be found to make a better one, will fill up a gap in 
literature which, I should hope, would give it a permanent 
value, — a value founded on its utility, though bringing no 
great fame or gain to its author. 

"Come to the worst, and suppose the thing a dead failure, 
and the book born only to be damned. Still, it will not be 
all in vain, since it has encouraged me in forming systematic 
habits of intellectual occupation, and proved to me that my 
greatest happiness is to be the result of such. It is no little 
matter to be possessed of this conviction from experience." 

But Prescott had received encouragement in his 
moods of doubt from Jared Sparks, at that time one 
of the most scientific American students of history. 
Sparks had read the book in one of the first printed 
copies, and had written to Prescott, in February, 1837: 
"The book will be successful — bought, read, and 
praised. " And so finally, on Christmas Day of 1837, 
— though dated 1838 upon the title-page, — the History 
of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella was first offered 
for sale. It was in three volumes of about four hun- 
dred pages each, and was dedicated to his father. 



iv] SUCCESS 69 

Only five hundred copies of the book had been 
printed as a first edition, and of these only a small 
number had been bound in readiness for the day of 
publication. The demand for the book took both 
author and publishers by surprise. This demand 
came, first of all, and naturally enough, from Prescott's 
personal friends. One of these, a gentleman of con- 
vivial habits, and by no means given to reading, rose 
early on Christmas morning and waited outside of the 
bookshop in order to secure the first copy sold. Lit- 
erary Boston, which was also fashionable Boston, 
adopted the book as its favourite New Year's present. 
The bookbinders could not work fast enough to supply 
the demand, and in a few months the whole of the 
1250 copies, which it had been supposed would last 
for at least five years, had been sold. Other parts of 
the country followed Boston's lead. The book was 
praised by the newspapers and, after a little interval, 
by the more serious reviews, — the North American, the 
Examiner, and the Democratic Review, the last of which 
published an elaborate appreciation by George Bancroft. 

Meanwhile, Prescott had succeeded in finding a 
London publisher ; for in May, Mr. Richard Bentley 
accepted the book, and it soon after appeared in Eng- 
land. To the English criticisms Prescott naturally 
looked forward with interest and something like anx- 
iety. American approval he might well ascribe to 
national bias if not to personal friendship. There- 
fore, the uniformly favourable reviews in his own 
country could not be accepted by him as definitely 
fixing the value of what he had accomplished. In a 
letter to Ticknor, after recounting his first success, 
he said : — 



70 WILLIAM HICRLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

" ' Poor fellow ! ' — I hear you exclaim by this time, — < his 
wits are actually turned by this flurry in his native village, 
— the Yankee Athens/ Not a whit, I assure you. Am I 
not writing to two dear friends, to whom I can talk as 
freely and foolishly as to one of my own household, and 
who, I am sure, will not misunderstand me? The effect 
of all this — which a boy at Dr. Gardiner's school, I re- 
member, called fungum popularitatem — has been rather to 

depress me, and $-r was saying yesterday, that she had 

never known me so out of spirits as since the book has 
come out." 

What he wanted most was to read a thoroughly im- 
partial estimate written by some foreign scholar of 
distinction. He had not long to wait. In the Athe- 
nceum there soon appeared a very eulogistic notice, 
written by Dr. Dunham, an industrious student of 
Spanish and Portuguese history. Then followed an 
admirably critical paper in the Edinburgh Review by 
Don Pascual de Gayangos, a distinguished Spanish 
writer living in England. Highly important among 
the English criticisms was that which was published in 
the Quarterly Review of June, 1839, from the pen of 
Richard Ford, a very accurate and critical Spanish 
scholar. Mr. Ford approached the book with something 
of the morgue of a true British pundit when dealing 
with the work of an unknown American ; * but, none 
the less, his criticism, in spite of his reluctance to 
praise, gave Prescott genuine pleasure. Ford found 
fault with some of the details of Ferdinand and Isa- 
bella, yet he was obliged to admit both the sound 
scholarship and literary merit of the book. On the 
Continent appeared the most elaborate review of all 
in a series of five articles written for the BibliotMque 

1 See ch. vii. 



iv.] SUCCESS 71 

Un icerselle de Gen&ve, by the Comte Adolphe de Circourt. 
The Comte was a friend of Lamartine (who called him 
la mappemonde vivante des connaissances hamaines) and 
also of Tocqueville and Cavour. Few of his contem- 
poraries possessed so minute a knowledge of the sub- 
ject which Prescott treated, and of the original sources 
of information ; and the favourably philosophical tone 
of the whole review was a great compliment to an 
author hitherto unknown in Europe. Still later, sin- 
cere and almost unqualified praise was given by Guizot 
in France, and by Lockhart, Southey, Hallam, and 
Milman, in England. Indeed, as Mr. Ticknor says, 
although these personages had never before heard of 
Prescott, their spirit was almost as kindly as if it had 
been due to personal friendship. The long years of 
discouragement, of endurance, and of patient, arduous 
toil had at last borne abundant fruit ; and from the 
time of the appearance of Ferdinand and Isabella, Pres- 
cott won and held an international reputation, and 
tasted to the full the sweets of a deserved success. 



CHAPTER V 

IN MID CAREER 

After the publication of Ferdinand and Isabella, its 
author rested on his oars, treating himself to social 
relaxation and enjoying thoroughly the praise which 
came to him from every quarter. Of course he had 
no intention of remaining idle long, but a new subject 
did not at once present itself so clearly to him as to 
make his choice of it inevitable. For about eighteen 
months, therefore, he took his ease. His correspond- 
ence, however, shows that he was always thinking of 
a second venture in the field of historical composition. 
His old bent for literary history led him to consider 
the writing of a life of Molikre — a book that should 
be agreeable and popular rather than profound. Yet 
Spain still kept its hold on his imagination, and even 
before his Ferdinand and Isabella had won its sure 
success, he had written in a letter to Ticknor the 
following paragraph : — 

" My heart is set on a Spanish subject, could I compass 
the materials : viz. the conquest of Mexico and the anterior 
civilisation of the Mexicans — a beautiful prose epic, for 
which rich virgin materials teem in Simancas and Madrid, 
and probably in Mexico. I would give a couple of thousand 
dollars that they lay in a certain attic in Bedford Street." 

This purpose lingered in his mind all through his 
holidays, which were, indeed, not wholly given up to 

72 



CHAP, v.] IN MID CAREER 73 

idleness, for he listened to a good deal of general 
reading at this time, most of it by no means of a 
superficial character. Ever since his little daughter's 
death, Prescott had felt a peculiar interest in the sub- 
ject of the immortality of the soul, and had read all 
of the most serious treatises to be found upon that 
subject. He had also gone carefully through the Gos- 
pels, weighing them with all the acumen which he 
had brought to bear upon his Castilian chronicles. 
This investigation, which he had begun with reference 
to the single question of immortality, broadened out 
into an examination of the whole evidential basis of 
orthodox Christianity. In this study he was aided by 
his father, who brought to it the keen, impartial judg- 
ment of an able lawyer. Of the conclusions at which 
he ultimately arrived, he was not wont to talk except 
on rare occasions, and his cast of mind was always 
reverential. He did, however, reject the doctrines of 
his Puritan ancestors. He held fast to the authen- 
ticity of the Gospels, but he found in these no evidence 
to support the tenets of Calvinism. 

Now, in his leisure time, he read over various works 
of a theological character, and came to the general 
conclusion that "the study of polemics or Biblical 
critics will tend neither to settle principles nor clear 
up doubts, but rather to confuse the former and multi- 
ply the latter." Prescott's whole religious creed was, 
it fact, summed up by himself in these words : " To 
do well and act justly, to fear and to love God, and 
to love our neighbour as ourselves — in these is the 
essence of religion. For what we can believe, we are 
not responsible, supposing we examine candidly and 
patiently. For what we do, we shall indeed be ac- 



74 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

countable. The doctrines of the Saviour unfold the 
whole code of morals by which our conduct should be 
regulated. Who, then, whatever difficulties he may 
meet with in particular incidents and opinions recorded 
in the Gospels, can hesitate to receive the great reli- 
gious and moral truths inculcated by the Saviour as 
the words of inspiration? I cannot, certainly. On 
these, then, I will rest." 

In April, 1838, Prescott took the first step toward 
beginning a study of the Mexican conquest. He wrote 
to Madrid in order to discover what materials were 
available for his proposed researches. At the same 
time he began collecting such books relating to Mexico 
as could be obtained in London. Securing personal 
letters to scholars and officials in Mexico itself, he 
wrote to them to enlist their interest in his new under- 
taking. By the end of the year it became evident that 
the wealth of material bearing upon the Conquest was 
very great, and a knowledge of this fact roused in 
Prescott all the enthusiasm of an historical investi- 
gator who has scented a new and promising trail. 
Only one thing now stood in the way. This was an 
intimation to the effect that Washington Irving had 
already planned a similar piece of work. This bit 
of news was imparted to Prescott by Mr. J. G. 
Cogswell, who was then in charge of the Astor Library 
in New York, and who was an intimate friend of both 
Prescott and Irving. Mr. Cogswell told Prescott that 
Irving was intending to write a history of the conquest 
of Mexico, as a sort of sequel, or rather pendant, to 
his life of Columbus. Of course, under the circum- 
stances, Prescott felt that, in courtesy to one who was 
then the most distinguished American man of letters, 



v.] IN MID CAREER 75 

he could not proceed with his undertaking so long as 
Mr. Irving was in the field. He therefore wrote a long 
letter to Irving, detailing what he had already done 
toward acquiring material, and to say that Mr. 
Cogswell had intimated that Irving was willing to 
relinquish the subject in his favour. 

14 1 have learned from Mr. Cogswell that you had origi- 
nally proposed to treat the same subject, and that you 
requested him to say to me that you should relinquish 
it in my favour. I cannot sufficiently express to you my 
sense of your courtesy, which I can very well appreciate, as 
I know the mortification it would have caused me if, con- 
trary to my expectations, I had found you on the ground. 
... I fear the public will not feel so much pleased as my- 
self by this liberal conduct on your part, and I am not sure 
that I should have a right in their eyes to avail myself of 
it. But I trust you will think differently when I accept 
your proffered courtesy in the same cordial spirit in which 
it was given. " 

To this letter Irving made a long and courteous 
reply, not only assuring Prescott that the subject 
would be willingly abandoned to him, but offering to 
send him any books that might be useful and to ren- 
der any service in his power. The episode affords 
a beautiful instance of literary and scholarly ameni- 
ties. The sacrifice which Irving made in giving up 
his theme was as fine as the manner of it was graceful. 
Prescott never knew how much it meant to Irving, 
who had already not only made some study of the sub- 
ject, but had sketched out the ground-plan of the 
first volume, and had been actually at work upon the 
task of composition for a period of three months. 
But there was something more in it than this. Writ- 
ing to his nephew, Pierre Irving, who was afterward 



76 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

his biographer, he disclosed his real feeling with much 
frankness. 

"I doubt whether Mr. Prescott was aware of the extent 
of the sacrifice I made. This was a favourite subject which 
had delighted my imagination ever since I was a boy. I 
had brought home books from Spain to aid me in it, and 
looked upon it as the pendant to my Columbus. When I 
gave it up to him I, in a manner, gave him up my bread ; 
for I depended upon the profits of it to recruit my waning 
finances. I had no other subject at hand to supply its 
place. I was dismounted from my cheval de bataille and 
have never been completely mounted since. Had I accom- 
plished that work my whole pecuniary situation would have 
been altered." * 

There was no longer any obstacle in Prescott's way, 
and he set to work with an interest which grew as the 
richness of the material revealed itself. There came 
to him from Madrid, books, manuscripts, copies of offi- 
cial documents, and all the apparatus criticus which 
even the most exacting scholar could require. The 
distinguished historian, Navarrete, placed his entire 
collection of manuscripts relating to Mexico and Peru 
at the disposal of his American confrere. The Spanish 
Academy let him have copies of the collections made 
by Munoz and by Vargas y Ponce — a matter of some 
five thousand pages. Prescott's friend, Senor Calcle- 
ron, who at this time was Spanish Minister to Mexico, 
aided him in gathering materials relating to the 
early Aztec civilisation. Don Pascual de Gayangos, 
who had written the favourable notice in the Edin- 
burgh Review, delved among the documents in the 
British Museum on behalf of Prescott, and caused 
copies to be made of whatever seemed to bear upon 

iLife of Irving, iii. p. 133 (New York, 1863). 



t.] IN MID CAREER 77 

the Mexican conquest. A year or two later, he even 
sent to Presoott the whole of his own collection of 
manuscripts. In Spain very valuable assistance was 
given by Mr. A. H. Everett, at that time American 
Minister to the Spanish court, and by his first Secre- 
tary of Legation, the South Carolinian who had taken 
his entrance examination to Harvard in Prescott's 
company, and who throughout his college life had 
been a close and valued friend. A special agent, Dr. 
Lembke, 1 was also employed, and he gave a good part 
of his time to rummaging among the archives and libra- 
ries. Prescott's authorship of Ferdinand and Isabella, 
however, was the real touchstone which opened all 
doors to him, and enlisted in his service enthusiastic 
purveyors of material in every quarter. In Spain 
especially, the prestige of his name was very great ; 
and more than one traveller from Boston received dis- 
tinguished courtesies in that country as being the 
conciudadano of the American historian. Mr. Edward 
Everett Hale, whose acquaintance with Prescott was 
very slight, relates an experience which is quite 
illustrative : — 

" I had gone there [to Madrid] to make some studies and 
collect some books for the history of the Pacific, which, with 
a prophetic instinct, I have always wanted to write. Dif- 
ferent friends gave me letters of introduction, and among 

1 Lembke was a German, the author of a work on early Spanish 
history, and a member of the Spanish Historical Academy. Pres- 
cott mentions him in his letter to Irving. " This learned Theban 
happens to be in Madrid for the nonce, pursuing some investiga- 
tions of his own, and he has taken charge of mine, like a true Ger- 
man, inspecting everything and selecting just what has reference 
to my subject. In this way he has been employed with four copy- 
ists since July, and has amassed a quantity of unpublished docu- 
ments. He has already sent off two boxes to Cadiz." 



78 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

others the gentlemen of the Spanish Embassy here were 
very kind to me. They gave me four such letters, and when 
I was in Madrid and when I was in Seville it seemed as 
though every door flew open for me and every facility was 
offered me. It was not until I was at home again that I 
came to know the secret of these most diligent civilities. 
I still had one of my Embassy letters which I had never 
presented. I read it for the first time, to learn that I was 
the coadjutor and friend of the great historian Prescott 
through all his life, that I was his assistant through all his 
historical work, and, indeed, for these reasons, no American 
was more worthy of the consideration of the gentlemen in 
charge of the Spanish archives. It was certainly by no 
fault of mine that an exaggeration so stupendous had found 
its way to the Spanish Legation. Somebody had said, what 
was true, that Prescott was always good to me, and that our 
friendship began when he engaged me as his reader. And, 
what with translating this simple story, what with people's 
listening rather carelessly and remembering rather carelessly, 
by the time my letters were drafted I had become a sort of 
' double ' of Mr. Prescott himself. I hope that I shall never 
hear that I disgraced him." * 

Actual work upon the Conquest began early in 1839, 
though not at first with a degree of progress which 
was satisfactory to the investigator. By May, how- 
ever, he had warmed to his work. He went back to 
his old rigorous regime, giving up again all social 
pleasures outside of his own house, and spending 
in his library at least five hours each day. His 
period of rest had done him good, and his eyesight 
was now better than at any time since it first became 
impaired. After three months of preliminary reading 
he was able to sketch out the plan of the entire work, 
and on October 14, 1839, he began the actual task of 
composition. He found the introduction extremely 

1 Hale, Memories of a Hundred Years, ii. pp. 71, 72 (New York, 
1902). 



v.] IN MID CAREER 79 

difficult to write, for it dealt with the pre-historic 
period of Mexico, obscured as it was by the mist of 
myth and by the contradictory assertions of conflict- 
ing authorities. "The whole of that part of the 
story," wrote Prescott, " is in twilight, and I fear I 
shall at least make only moonshine of it. I must 
hope that it will be good moonshine. It will go hard 
with me, however, but that I can fish something new 
out of my ocean of manuscripts." He had hoped to 
dispose of his introduction in a hundred pages, and to 
finish it in six months at the most. It actually ex- 
tended to two hundred and fifty pages, and the writing 
of it took nearly eighteen months. One interruption 
occurred which he had not anticipated. The success of 
Ferdinand and Isabella had tempted an unscrupulous 
publisher to undertake an abridgment of that book. 
To protect his own interests Prescott decided to make 
an abridgment of his own, and thus to forestall the 
pirate. This work disheartened and depressed him, 
but he finished it with great celerity, only to find that 
the rival abridgment had been given up. A brief stay 
upon the sea-coast put him once more into working con- 
dition, and from that time he went on steadily with the 
Conquest, which he completed on August 2, 1843, not 
quite four years from the time when he began the 
actual composition. His weariness was lightened by 
the confidence which he felt in his own success. He 
knew that he had produced a masterpiece. 

Naturally, he now had no trouble in securing a pub- 
lisher and in making very advantageous terms for the 
production of the book. It was brought out by the 
Harpers of New York, though, as before, Prescott 
himself owned the plates. His contract allowed the 



80 WILLIAM SICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

Harpers to publish five thousand copies for which 
they paid the author $7500, with the right of publish- 
ing more copies if required within the period of one 
year and on the same general terms. An English 
edition was simultaneously brought out by Bentley in 
London, who purchased the foreign copyright for £650. 
Three Spanish translations appeared soon after, one in 
Madrid in 1847 and two in Mexico in 1844. A French 
translation was published in Paris, by Didot in 1846, 
and a German translation, in Leipzig, by Brockhaus in 
1845. A French reprint in English appeared in Paris 
soon after Bentley placed the London edition upon the 
market. 

"So historical work written by an American has ever 
been received with so much enthusiasm alike in Amer- 
ica and in Europe. Within a month, four thousand 
copies were disposed of by the Harpers, and at the 
end of four months the original edition of five thou- 
sand had been sold. The reviewers were unanimous 
in its praise, and an avalanche of congratulatory letters 
descended upon Prescott from admirers, known and 
unknown, all over the civilised world. Ferdinand and 
Isabella had brought him reputation ; the Conquest of 
Mexico made him famous. Honours came to him un- 
sought. He was elected a member of the French 
Institute 1 and of the Eoyal Society of Berlin. He 
had already accepted membership in the Eoyal Span- 
ish Academy of History at Madrid and in the Eoyal 
Academy of Sciences in Naples. Harvard conferred 
upon him the degree of Doctor of Laws. Perhaps 
nothing pleased him more, however, than a personal 

1 In place of Navarrete, deceased. Prescott received eighteen 
ballots out of the twenty that were cast. 



v.] IN MID CAREER 81 

letter from Humboldt, for whom Prescott had long en- 
tertained a feeling of deep admiration. This eminent 
scholar, at that time the President of the Royal Society 
of Berlin, in which body Xiebuhr, Von Raumer, and 
Ranke had been enrolled, wrote in French a letter of 
which the following sentences form a part : — 

u My satisfaction has been very great in studying line by 
line your excellent work. One judges with severity, with 
perhaps a bias towards injustice, when he has had a vivid 
impression of the places, and when the study of ancient his- 
tory with which I have been occupied from preference has 
been pursued on the very soil itself where a part of these 
great events took place. My severity, sir. has been disarmed 
by the reading of your Conquest of Mexico. You paint with 
success because you have seen with the eyes of the spirit and 
of the inner sense. It is a pleasure to me, a citizen of Mexico, 
to have lived long enough to read you and to speak to you 
of my appreciation of the kind expressions with which you 
have done honour to my name. . . . Were I not wholly 
occupied with my Cosmo*, which I have had the imprudence 
to print, I should have wished to translate your work into 
the language of my own country. ,, 

While gathering the materials for the Conquest of 
Mexico, Prescott had felt his way toward still another 
subject which his Mexican researches naturally sug- 
gested. This was the conquest of Peru. Much of his 
Mexican reading had borne directly upon this other 
theme, so that the labour of preparation was greatly 
lightened. Moreover, by this time, he had acquired 
both an accurate knowledge of sources and also great 
facility in composition. Hence the only serious work 
which was necessary for him to undertake as a pre- 
liminary to composition was the study of Peruvian 
antiquities. This occupied him eight months, and 
proved to be far more troublesome to him and much 



82 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

less satisfactory than the like investigation which he 
had made with reference ta the Aztecs. However, 
after the work had been commenced it proceeded 
rapidly, — so rapidly, in fact, as to cause him a feel- 
ing of half-comical dismay. He began to write on 
the 12th of August, 1844, and completed his task on 
November 7, 1846. During its progress he made a 
note that he had written two chapters, amounting in 
all to fifty-one printed pages, in four days, adding the 
comment, " I never did up so much yarn in the same 
time. At this rate Peru will not hold out six months. 
Can I finish it in a year ? Alas for the reader ! " No 
doubt he might have finished it in a year had certain 
interruptions not occurred. The first of these was the 
death of his father, which took place on December 8th, 
not long after he had begun the book. His brother Ed- 
ward had died shortly before, and this double affliction 
affected very deeply so sensitive a nature as Preseott's. 
To his father, indeed, he owed more than he could ever 
express. The two had been true comrades, and had 
treated one another with an affectionate familiarity 
which, between father and son, was as rare in those 
days as it was beautiful. Judge Prescott's generosity 
had made it possible for the younger man to break 
through all the barriers of physical infirmity, and not 
only to win fame but also the happiness which comes 
from a creative activity. They understood each other 
very well, and in many points they were much alike 
both in their friendliness and in their habits of reserve. 
One little circumstance illustrates this likeness rather 
curiously. Fond as both of them were of their fellows, 
and cordial as they both were to all their friends, each 
wished at times to be alone, and these times were 



v.] IN MID CAREER 83 

when they walked or rode. Therefore, each morning 
when the two men mounted their horses or when they 
set out for a walk, they always parted company when 
they reached the road, one turning to the right and the 
other to the left by a tacit understanding, and neither 
ever thought of accompanying the other. Sometimes 
a friend not knowing of this trait would join one of 
them to share the ride or walk. Whenever such a 
thing as this took place, that particular route would be 
abandoned the next day and another and a lonelier 
one selected. 

A further interruption came from the purchase 
of a house on Beacon Street and the necessity of 
arranging to leave the old mansion on Bedford Street. 
The new house was a fine one, overlooking the Mall 
and the Common; and the new library, which was 
planned especially for Prescott's needs, was much 
more commodious than the old one. But the confusion 
and feeling of unsettlement attendant on the change 
distracted Prescott more than it would have done a 
man less habituated to a self-imposed routine. "A 
month of pandemonium," he wrote; "an unfurnished 
house coming to order ; a library without books ; books 
without time to open them." It took Prescott quite 
a while to resume his methodical habits. His old-time 
indolence settled down upon him, and it was some 
time before his literary momentum had been recov- 
ered. Moreover, he presumed upon the fairly satis- 
factory condition of his eye and used it to excess. 
The result was that his optic nerve was badly over- 
taxed, " probably by manuscript digging," as he said. 
The strain was one from which his eye never fully 
recovered ; and from this time until the completion of 



84 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

the Peru, he could use it in reading for only a few- 
minutes every day, sometimes perhaps for ten or fif- 
teen, but never for more than thirty. As this is the 
last time that we shall mention this subject, it may be 
said that for all purposes of literary work Prescott was 
soon afterward reduced to the position of one who was 
actually blind. What had before been a merely station- 
ary dimness of vision became a slowly progressive 
decay of sight, or, to express it in medical language, 
amblyopia had passed into amaurosis. He followed 
rigorously his oculist's injunctions, but in the end he 
had to face the facts unflinchingly ; and a little later 
he recorded his determination to give up all use of the 
eye for the future in his studies, and to be contented 
with preserving it for the ordinary purposes of life. 
The necessity disheartened him. " It takes the strength 
out of me," he said. Nevertheless, neither this nor 
the fact that his general health was most unsatisfac- 
tory, caused him to abandon work. He could not bring 
himself to use what he called "the coward's word, 
' impossible.' " And so, after a little time, he went on 
as before, studying "by ear- work," and turning off 
upon his noctograph from ten to fifteen pages every 
day. He continued also his outdoor exercise, and, in 
fact, one of the best-written chapters of the Conquest 
of Peru — the last one — was composed while gallop- 
ing through the woods at Pepperell. On November 7, 
1846, the Conquest of Peru was finished. Like the 
preceding history, it was published by the Harper 
Brothers, who agreed to pay the author one dollar per 
copy and to bring out a first edition of seventy-five 
hundred copies. This, Mr. Ticknor says, was a more 
liberal arrangement than had ever before been made 



v.] IN MID CAREER 85 

with an historical writer in the United States. The 
English copyright was purchased by Bentley for £800. 
Prescott's main anxiety about the reception which 
would be given to the Conquest of Pent was based 
upon his doubts as to its literary style. Neither 
of his other books had been written so rapidly, and 
he feared that he might incur the charge of over- 
fluency or even slovenliness. Yet, as a matter of fact, 
the chorus of praise which greeted the two volumes 
was as loud and as spontaneous as it had been over his 
Mexico. Prescott now stood so firmly on his feet as 
to look at much of this praise in a somewhat humor- 
ous light. The approbation of the Edinburgh Review 
no longer seemed to him the summa laus, though he 
valued it more highly than the praise given him by 
American periodicals, of which he wrote very shrewdly : 

" I don't know how it is, but our critics, though not pedan- 
tic, have not the businesslike air, or the air of the man of the 
world, which gives manliness and significance to criticism. 
Their satire, when they attempt it — which cannot be often 
laid to their door — has neither the fine edge of the Edinburgh 
nor the sledgehammer stroke of the Quarterly. They twad- 
dle out their humour as if they were afraid of its biting 
too hard, or else they deliver axioms with a sort of smart, 
dapper conceit, like a little parson laying down the law to 
his little people. ... In England there is a far greater 
number of men highly cultivated — whether in public life 
or men of leisure — whose intimacy with affairs and with 
society, as well as books, affords supplies of a high order for 
periodical criticism." 

As for newspaper eulogies, he remarked : " I am 
certainly the cause of some wit and much folly in 
others." His latest work, however, brought him two 
new honours which he greatly prized, — an election 



86 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

to the Eoyal English Society of Literature, and the 
other an invitation to membership in the Royal Society 
of Antiquaries. The former honour he shared with 
only one of his fellow-countrymen, Bancroft ; the lat- 
ter had heretofore been given to no American. 

Prescott now indulged himself with a long period 
of " literary loafing," as he described it, broken in 
upon only by the preparation of a short memoir of 
John Pickering, the antiquarian and scholar, who had 
been one of Prescott's most devoted friends. This 
memoir was undertaken at the request of the Massa- 
chusetts Historical Society. It has no general interest 
now, but is worthy of note as having been the only one 
of Prescott's works which he dictated to an amanuen- 
sis. Prescott had an aversion to writing in this way, 
although he had before him the example of his blind 
contemporary, Thierry. Like Alphonse Daudet, he 
seems to have felt that what is written by hand comes 
more directly from the author's inner self, and that 
it represents most truly the tints and half-tones of his 
personality. That this is only a fancy is seen clearly 
enough from several striking instances which the his- 
tory of literature records. Scott dictated to Lockhart 
the whole of The Bride of Lammermoor. Thackeray 
dictated a good part of TJie Newcomes and all of Pen- 
dennis, and even Henry Esmond, of which the artificial 
style might well have made dictation difficult. Pres- 
cott, however, had his own opinion on the subject, and, 
with the single exception which has just been cited, he 
used his noctograph for composition down to the very 
end, dictating only his correspondence to his secretary. 

His days of " literary loafing" allowed him to enjoy 
the pleasures of friendship which during his periods 



v.] IN xMID CAREER 87 

of work were necessarily, to some extent, intermitted. 
No man ever had more cordially devoted friends than 
Prescott. He knew every one who was worth knowing, 
and every one was attracted by the spontaneous charm 
of his manner and his invincible kindliness. Never 
was a man more free from petulance or peevishness, 
though these defects at times might well have been 
excused in one whose health was such as his. He 
presented the anomaly of a dyspeptic who was still an 
optimist and always amiable. Mr. John Foster Kirk, 
who was one of his secretaries, wrote of him : — 

M Xo annoyance, great or small, the most painful illness 
or the most intolerable bore, could disturb his equanimity, 
or render him in the least degree sullen, or fretful, or dis- 
courteous. He was always gay, good-humoured, and manly. 
He carried his kindness of disposition not only into his 
public, but into his private, writings. In the hundreds of 
letters, many of them of the most confidential character, 
treating freely of other authors and of a great variety of per- 
sons, which I wrote at his dictation, not a single unkind or 
harsh or sneering expression occurs. He was totally free 
from the jealousy and envy so common among authors, and 
was always eager in conversation, as in print, to point out 
the merits of the great contemporary historians whom many 
men in his position would have looked upon as rivals to be 
dreaded if not detested." 

Bancroft the historian has added his testimony to 
the greatness of Prescott's personal charm. 

u His countenance had something that brought to mind 
the ' beautiful disdain ' that hovers on that of the Apollo. 
But while he was high-spirited, he was tender and gentle 
and humane. His voice was like music and one could never 
hear enough of it. His cheerfulness reached and animated 
all about him. He could indulge in playfulness and could 
also speak earnestly and profoundly ; but he knew not how 
to be ungracious or pedantic." 



88 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

No wonder then that his friends were legion, com- 
prising men and women of the most different types. 
Dry and formal scholars such as Jared Sparks ; men 
of the world like Lord Carlisle ; nice old ladies like 
Maria Edgeworth and the octogenarian Miss Berry, 
Walpole's friend ; women of fashion like Lady Lyell, 
Lady Mary Labouchere, and the Duchess of Suther- 
land; Spanish hidalgos like Calderon de la Barca; 
smooth politicians like Caleb Cushing; and intense 
partisans like Charles Sumner, — all agreed in their 
affectionate admiration for Prescott. His friendship 
with Sumner was indeed quite notable, since no men 
could have been more utterly unlike. Sumner was 
devoid of the slightest gleam of humour, and his self- 
consciousness was extreme; yet Prescott sometimes 
poked fun at him with impunity. Thus, writing to 
Sumner about his Phi Beta Kappa oration (delivered 
in 1846), he said: — 

"Last year you condemned wars in toto, making no excep- 
tion even for the wars of freedom. This year you condemn 
the representation of war, whether by the pencil or the pen. 
Marathon, Salamis, Bunker Hill, the retreat from Moscow, 
Waterloo, great and small, are all to be blotted from mem- 
ory equally with my own wild skirmishes of barbarians and 
banditti. Lord deliver us ! Where will you bring up ? If 
the stories are not to be painted or written, such records of 
them as have been heedlessly made should by the same rule 
be destroyed. I laugh ; but I fear you will make the judicious 
grieve. But fare thee well, dear Sumner. Whether thou de- 
portest thyself sana mente or mente insana, believe me always 
truly yours." 

But Sumner's arrogance and egoism were always in 
abeyance where Prescott was concerned, and even their 
lack of political sympathy never marred the warmth 



v.] IN MID CAREER 89 

of their intercourse. Prescott, in fact, cared very little 
about contemporary politics. He had inherited from 
his fighting ancestors a sturdy patriotism, but his loy- 
alty was given to the whole country and not to any 
faction or party. His cast of mind was essentially 
conservative, and down to 1856 he would no doubt 
have called himself an old-line Whig. He was always, 
however, averse to political discussion which, indeed, 
led easily to personalities that were offensive not only 
to Prescott's taste but to his amiable disposition. His 
friend Parsons said of him : " He never sought or 
originated political conversation, but he would not de- 
cline contributing his share to it; and the contribu- 
tion he made was always of good sense, of moderation, 
and of forbearance.' 7 

Prescott's detachment with regard to politics was 
partly due, no doubt, to the nature of the life he led, 
which kept him isolated from the bustle of the world 
about him ; yet it was probably due still more to a 
lack of combativeness in his nature. Motley once 
said of him that he lacked the capacity for sceva 
:>. This remark was called forth by Pres- 
s tolerant view of Philip II. of Spain, who was 
in Motley's eyes little better than a monster. One 
might fairly, however, give it a wider application, and 
we must regard it as an undeniable defect in Prescott 
that nothing external could strike fire from him. 
Thus, when his intimate friend Sumner had been 
brutally assaulted in the Senate chamber by the 
Southern bully, Brooks, Prescott wrote to him : u You 
have escaped the crown of martyrdom by a narrow 
chance, and have got all the honours, which are 
almost as dangerous to one's head as a gutta-percha 



90 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

cane." There is a tameness about this sentence which 
one would scarcely notice had Sumner merely received 
a black eye, but which offends one's sense of fitness 
when we recall that Sumner had been beaten into 
insensibility, and that he never fully recovered from 
the attack. Again, when, in 1854, Boston was all 
ablaze over the capture of a fugitive slave, when the 
city was filled with troops and muskets were levelled 
at the populace, Prescott merely remarked to an 
English correspondent: "It is a disagreeable busi- 
ness." To be sure, he also said, "It made my blood 
boil," but the general tone of the letter shows that his 
blood must have boiled at a very low temperature. 
Nevertheless, he seems to have been somewhat stirred 
by the exciting struggle which took place over Kansas 
between the Free-Soil forces and the partisans of slav- 
ery. Hence, in 1856, he cast his vote for Fremont, 
the first Republican candidate for the Presidency. 
But, as a rule, the politics of the sixteenth century 
were his most serious concern, and in the very year in 
which he voted for Fremont, he wrote: "I belong to 
the sixteenth century and am quite out of place when I 
sleep elsewhere." It was this feeling which led him 
to decline a tempting invitation to write a history 
of the modern conquest of Mexico by the American 
army under General Scott. The offer came to him 
in 1847 ; and both the theme itself and the terms in 
which the offer was made might well have attracted 
one whose face was set less resolutely toward the 
historic past. His comment was characteristic. "I 
had rather not meddle with heroes who have not 
been under ground two centuries at least." It is 
interesting to note that the subject which Prescott 



v.] IN MID CAREER 91 

then rejected has never been adequately treated ; and 
that the brilliant exploits of Scott in Mexico still await 
a worthy chronicler. 

It was natural that a writer so popular as Prescott 
should, in spite of his methodical life, find his time 
encroached upon by those who wished to meet him. 
He had an instinct for hospitality ; and this made it 
the more difficult for him to maintain that scholarly 
seclusion which had been easy to him in the days of 
his comparative obscurity. His personal friends were 
numerous, and there were many others who sought 
him out because of his distinction. Many foreign 
visitors were entertained by him, and these he re- 
ceived with genuine pleasure. Their number increased 
as the years went by so that once in a single week he 
entertained, at Pepperell, Senor Calderon, Stephens the 
Central American traveller, and the British General 
Harlan from Afghanistan. Sir Charles Lyell, Lady 
Lyell, Lord Carlisle, and Dickens were also visitors of 
his. It was as the guest of Prescott that Thackeray ate 
his first dinner in America. 1 Visitors of this sort, of 
course, he was very glad to see. Not so much could be 
said of the strangers who forced themselves upon him 
at Nahant, where swarms of summer idlers filled the 
hotels and cottages, and with well-meaning but thought- 
less interest sought out the historian in the darkened 
parlour of his house. " I have lost a clear month here 
by company," he wrote in 1840, " company which brings 
the worst of all satieties ; for the satiety from study 
brings the consciousness of improvement. But this 
dissipation impairs health, spirit, scholarship. Yet 
how can I escape it, tied like a bear to a stake here ? " 
1 Wilson, Thackeray in America, i. pp. 16, 17 (New York, 1904). 



92 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

Prescott's favourite form of social intercourse was 
found in little dinners shared with a few chosen 
friends. These affairs he called " cronyings," and in 
them he took much delight, even though they often 
tempted him to an over-indulgence in tobacco and 
sometimes in wine. 1 One rule, however, he seldom 
broke, and that was his resolve never to linger after 
ten o'clock at any function, however pleasant. An 
old friend of his has left an account of one especially 
convivial occasion to which Prescott had invited a 
number of his friends. The dinner was given at a 
restaurant, and the guests were mostly young men 
and fond of good living. The affair went off so well 
that, as the hour of ten approached, no one thought 
of leaving. Prescott began to fidget in his chair 
and even to drop a hint or two, which passed un- 
noticed, for the reason that Prescott's ten o'clock 
rule was quite unknown to his jovial guests. At 
last, to the surprise of every one, he rose and made 
a little speech to the company, in which he said 
that he was sorry to leave them, but that he must 
return home. 

" But," he added, " I am sure you will be very soon in no 
condition to miss me, — especially as I leave behind that 
excellent representative " — pointing to a basket of uncorked 
bottles which stood in a corner. " Then you know you are 
just as much at home in this house as I am. You can call 
for what you like. Don't be alarmed — I mean on my ac- 
count. I abandon to you, without reserve, all my best wines, 
my credit with the house, and my reputation to boot. Make 
free with them all, I beg of you — and if you don't go home 
till morning, I wish you a merry night of it." 

i Meaning, of course, that he took more wine than was good for 
his eye. 



v.] IN MID CAREER 03 

It is to be hoped that Prescott was not quite accu- 
rately reported, and that he did not speak that little 
sentence, " Don't be alarmed," which may have been 
characteristic of a New Englander, but which cer- 
tainly would have induced a different sort of guests to 
leave the place at once. If he did say it, however, it 
was somewhat in keeping with the tactlessness which 
he occasionally showed. The habit of frank speech, 
which had made him a nuisance as a boy, never quite 
left him, and he frequently blurted out things which 
were of the sort that one would rather leave un- 
said. His wife would often nod and frown at him on 
these occasions, and then he would always make the 
matter worse by asking her, with the greatest inno- 
cence, what the matter was. Mr. Ogden records an 
amusing instance of Prescott's naivete during his last 
visit to England. Conversing about Americanisms 
with an English lady of rank, she criticised the Ameri- 
can use of the word " snarl " in the sense of disorder. 
" Why, surely," cried Prescott, " you would say that 
your ladyship's hair is in a snarl ! " Which, unfortu- 
nately, it was — a fact that by no means soothed the 
lady's temper at being told so. There was a certain 
boyishness about Prescott, however, which usually 
enabled him to carry these things off without offence, 
because they were obviously so natural and so unpre- 
meditated. His boyishness took other forms which 
were more generally pleasing. One evidence of it was 
his fondness for such games as blindman's buff and 
puss-in-the-corner, in which he used to engage with all 
the zest of a child, even after he had passed his fif- 
tieth year, and in which the whole household took part, 
together with any distinguished foreigners who might 



94 WILLIAM HICKLING PBESCOTT [chap. 

be present. Another youthful trait was his readiness 
to burst into song on all occasions, even in the midst 
of his work. In fact, just before beginning any ani- 
mated bit of descriptive writing he would rouse him- 
self up by shouting out some ballad that had caught 
his fancy ; so that strangers visiting his house would 
often be amused when, from the grave historian's study, 
there came forth the sonorous musical appeal, " give 
me but my Arab steed ! " Boyish, too, was his racy 
talk, full of colloquialisms and bits of Yankee dialect, 
with which also his personal correspondence was pep- 
pered. Even though his rather prim biographer, 
Ticknor, has gone over Prescott's letters with a fine- 
tooth comb, there still remain enough of these Doric 
gems to make us wish that all of them had been re- 
tained. It is interesting to find the author of so many 
volumes of stately and ornate narration letting himself 
go in private life, and dropping into such easy phrases 
as " whopper-jawed," " cotton to," " quiddle," " book 
up," " crack up," " podder " (a favourite word of his), 
and " slosh." He retained all of a young man's delight 
in his own convivial feats, and we find him in one of 
his letters, after describing a rather prolonged and 
complicated entertainment, asking gleefully, "Am I 
not a fast boy ? " 

His Yankee phrases were the hall-mark of his 
Yankee nature. Old England, with all its beauty of 
landscape and its exquisite finish, never drove New 
England from his head or heart. Thus, on his third 
visit to England, he wrote to his wife : " I came through 
the English garden, — lawns of emerald green, wind- 
ing streams, light arched bridges, long lines stretch- 
ing between hedges of hawthorn all flowering ; rustiq 



v.] IN MID CAREER 05 

cottages, lordly mansions, and sweeping woods — the 
whole landscape a miracle of beauty." And then he 
adds : " I would have given something to see a ragged 
fence, or an old stump, or a bit of rock, or even a stone 
as big as one's fist, to show that man's hand had not 
been combing Nature's head so vigorously. I felt I 
was not in my own dear, wild America." Prescott was 
a true Yankee also in the carefulness of his attention 
to matters of business. He did not value money for 
its own sake. His father had left him a handsome 
competence. He spent freely both for himself and 
for his friends ; but none the less, he made the 
most minute notes of all his publishing ventures 
and analysed the publishers' returns as carefully as 
though he were a professional accountant. This was 
due in part, no doubt, to a natural desire to measure 
the popularity of his books by the standard of financial 
success. He certainly had no reason to be dissatisfied. 
Up to the time of his death, of the Ferdinand and 
Isabella there had been sold in the United States and 
England nearly eighteen thousand copies ; of the 
Conquest of Mexico, twenty-four thousand copies ; and 
of the Conquest of Peru, seventeen thousand copies — a 
total, for the three works, of nearly sixty thousand 
copies. When we remember that each of these histories 
was in several volumes and was expensively printed and 
bound, and that the reading public was much smaller 
in those days than now, this is a very remarkable 
showing for three serious historical works. Since his 
death, the sales have grown greater with the increase 
of general readers and the lapse of the American copy- 
right. Prescott made excellent terms with his pub- 
lishers, as has already been recorded, and if a decision 



96 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

of the House of Lords had been favourable to his 
copyright in England, his literary gains in that coun- 
try would have been still larger. 1 

His liking for New England country life led him to 
maintain in addition to his Boston house, at 55 Beacon 
Street, two other places of residence. One was at 
Nahant, then, as now, a very popular resort in sum- 
mer. There he had an unpretentious wooden cot- 
tage of two stories, with a broad veranda about it, 
occupying an elevated position at the extremity of a 
bold promontory which commanded a wide view of 
the sea. Nahant is famous for its cool — almost too 
cool — sea-breeze, which even in August so tempers 
the heat of the sun as to make a shaded spot almost 
uncomfortably cold. This bracing air Prescott found 
admirably tonic, and beneficial both to his eye and to 
his digestion, which was weak. On the other hand, 
the dampness of the breeze affected unfavourably his 
tendency to rheumatism, so that he seldom spent more 
than eight weeks of the year upon the sea-shore. He 
found also that the reflection of the sun from the 
water was a thing to be avoided. Therefore, he most 
thoroughly enjoyed his other country place at Pep- 
perell, where his grandmother had lived. The plain 
little house, known as " The Highlands/' and shaded 
by great trees, seemed to him his truest home. Here, 
more than elsewhere, he threw off his cares and gave 
himself up completely to his drives and rides and walks 
and social pleasures. The country round about was 
then well wooded, and Prescott delighted to gallop 
through the forests and over the rich countryside, 
every inch of which had been familiar to him since 
i See p. 116. 



v.] IN MID CAREER 97 

his boyhood days. lie felt something of the English 
landowner's pride in remembering that his modest 
estate had been in the possession of his family for 
more than a century and a half — "An uncommon 
event," he wrote, " among our locomotive people." 
Behind the house was a lovely shaded walk with a dis- 
tant view of Mount Monadnock ; and here Prescott 
often strolled while composing portions of his histories 
before committing them to paper. Beyond the road 
stood a picturesque cluster of oak trees, making a thick 
grove which he called " the Fairy Grove," for in it he 
used to tell his children the stories about elves and 
gnomes and fairies which delighted them so much. 

It was the death of his parents that led him in the 
last years of his own life to abandon this home which 
he so dearly loved. The memories which associated it 
with them were painful to him after they had gone. 
He missed their faces and their happy converse, and 
so, in 1853, he purchased a house on Lynn Bay, 
some five or six miles distant from his cottage at 
Nahant. Here the sea-breeze was cool but never damp ; 
while, unlike Nahant, the place was surrounded by 
green meadow-land and pleasant woods. This new 
house was much more luxurious than the cottages at 
Nahant and Pepperell, and he spent at Lynn nearly 
all his summers during his last five years. He added to 
the place, laying out its grounds and tastefully decorat- 
ing its interior, having in view not merely his own com- 
fort but that of his children and grandchildren, who 
now began to gather about him. His daughter Elizabeth, 
who was married in 1852 to Mr. James Lawrence of 
Boston, occupied a delightful country house near by. 

One memorial of Prescott long remained here to recall 



98 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. v. 

alike the owner of the place and the work to which his 
life had been devoted. This was a large cherry tree, 
which afforded the only shade about the house when he 
first took possession of it. The state of his eye made 
it impossible for him to remain long in the sunshine ; 
and so, in his hours of composition, he paced around 
the circle of the shade afforded by this tree, carrying 
in his hand a light umbrella, which he raised for a 
moment when he passed that portion of the circle on 
which the sunlight fell. He thus trod a deep path 
in the turf; and for years after his death the path 
remained still visible, — a touching reminder to those 
friends of his who saw it. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE LAST TEN YEARS 

While Prescott was still engaged in his Mexican and 
Peruvian researches, and, in fact, even before he had 
undertaken them, another fascinating subject had 
found lodgement in his mind. So far back as 1838, 
only a few months after the publication of Ferdinand 
and Isabella, he had said : " Should I succeed in my 
present collections, who knows what facilities I may 
find for making one relative to Philip the Second's 
reign — a fruitful theme if discussed under all its 
relations, civil and literary as well as military." And 
again, in 1839, he reverted to the same subject in his 
memoranda. Could he have been sure of obtaining 
access to the manuscript and other sources, he might 
at that time have chosen this theme in preference to 
the story of the Mexican conquest. He knew, how- 
ever, that nothing could be done unless he were able 
to make a free use of the Spanish archives preserved 
at Simancas. To this ancient town, at the suggestion 
of Cardinal Ximenes, the most precious historical 
documents relating to Spanish history had been re- 
moved, in 1536, by order of Charles V. The old 
castle of the Admiral of Castile had been prepared to 
receive them, and there they still remained, as they do 
to-day, filling some fifty large rooms and contained 
in some eighty thousand packages. It has been esti- 

99 ILofC. 



100 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

mated that fully thirty million separate documents of 
various kinds are included in this remarkably rich 
collection, — not only state papers of a formal char- 
acter, but private letters, secret reports, and the con- 
fidential correspondence of Spanish ambassadors in 
foreign countries. 1 Such a treasure-house of historical 
information scarcely exists elsewhere ; and Prescott, 
therefore, wrote to his friends in Madrid to learn 
whether he might hope for access to this Spanish 
Vatican. In 1839, however, he made the following 
memorandum: " By advices from Madrid this week, I 
learn that the archives of Simancas are in so dis- 
orderly a state that it is next to impossible to gather 
material for the reign of Philip II." His friend, 
Arthur Middleton, cited to him the instance of a young 
scholar who had been permitted to explore these col- 
lections for six months, and who had found that the 
documents of a date prior to the year 1700 were " all 
thrown together without order or index." Further- 
more, Prescott's agent in Spain, Dr. Lembke, had 
incurred the displeasure of the government, which 
expelled him from the country. Prescott was, there- 
fore, obliged for the time to put aside the project of a 
history of Philip II., and he turned instead to the 
study of the Mexican conquest. 

Nevertheless, with that quiet pertinacity which was 
one of his conspicuous traits, he still kept the theme 
in mind, and let it be known to his friends in Paris 
and London, as well as in Madrid and elsewhere, that 
all materials bearing upon the career of Philip II. 

1 For an interesting account of Simancas and the archives, see a 
paper by Dr. W. R. Shepherd, in the Reports of the American His- 
torical Association for 1903 (Washington, 1905). 



vi] THE LAST TEN YEARS 101 

were much desired by him. These friends re- 
sponded very zealously to his wishes. In Paris, M. 
Mignet and M. Ternaux-Compans allowed Dr. Lernbke 
to have their important manuscript collections copied. 
In London, Prescott's correspondent and former re- 
viewer, Don Pascual de Gayangos, searched the docu- 
ments in the British Museum and a very rich private 
collection owned by Sir Thomas Philips. He also 
visited Brussels, where he found more valuable mate- 
rial, and later, having been appointed Professor of 
Arabic in the University of Madrid (1842), he used 
his influence on behalf of Prescott with very great 
success. Many noble houses in Spain put at his dis- 
posal their family memorials. The National Library 
and other public institutions offered whatever they 
possessed in the way of books and papers. Two years 
later, this indefatigable friend spent some weeks at 
Simancas, where he unearthed many an interesting 
trouvaille. Even these sources, however, were not the 
only ones which contributed to Prescott's store of 
documents. Ferdinand Wolf in Vienna, and Hum- 
boldt and Banke in Berlin, also aided him, and se- 
cured additional material, not only in Austria and 
Prussia, but in Tuscany. His collection grew apace ; 
so that, long before he was ready to take up the sub- 
ject of Philip II., he possessed over three hundred and 
seventy volumes bearing directly upon the reign of 
that monarch, while his manuscript copies, which ne 
caused to be richly bound, came to number in the end 
some thirty-eight huge folios. These occupied a posi- 
tion of special honour in his library, and were playfully 
called by him his Seraglio. 

Thus, in 1847, when about to take up his fourth 



102 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

important work, he was already richly documented. 
His health, however, was unsatisfactory. He had 
now some ailments that had become chronic, — dys- 
pepsia and a urethral complication, which often caused 
him intense suffering. It was not until July 29, 
1849, that he began to write the first chapter of Philip 
IL at Nahant. He makes the laconic note : " Heavy 
work, this starting. I have been out of harness too 
long. . . . The business of fixing thought is incredi- 
bly difficult." He continued writing at Pepperell, 
and at his home in Boston, until he had regained a 
good deal of his old facility. His physical strength, 
however, was waning, and he could no longer continue 
to work with his former regularity and method. He 
lost flesh, and was threatened for a while with deafness, 
the fear of which was almost too much for even his 
inveterate cheerfulness. In February, 1850, he wrote : 
" Increasing interest in the work is hardly to be ex- 
pected, considering it has to depend so much on the ear. 
As I shall have to depend more and more on this one of 
my senses as I grow older, it is to be hoped that Provi- 
dence will spare me my hearing. It would be a fear- 
ful thing to doubt it." His depression finally became 
so great that he suspended for a time his labours and 
made a short visit to Washington, where he was re- 
ceived with abundant hospitality. He was entertained 
by President Taylor, by Sir Henry Bulwer, the British 
Minister, by Webster, and by many other distinguished 
persons ; but he became more and more convinced that 
a complete change was necessary to restore his health 
and spirits ; and so, on May 22d of the same year, he 
sailed from New York for Liverpool, where he arrived 
on the 3d of June. 



vi] THE LAST TEN YEARS 103 

Prescott's stay in England was perhaps the most 
delightful episode in his life. His biographer, Mr. 
Ticknor, speaks of it as " the most brilliant visit ever 
made to England by an American citizen not clothed 
with the prestige of official station." The assertion is 
quite true, since the cordiality which Lowell met with 
in that country was, in part, at any rate, due to his 
diplomatic rank, while General Grant was essentially 
a political personage who was, besides, personally 
commended to all foreign courts by his successor in 
office, President Hayes. But Prescott, with no cre- 
dentials save his reputation as a man of letters and 
his own charming personality, enjoyed a welcome of 
boundless cordiality. It was not merely that he was 
a literary celebrity and was received everywhere by his 
brothers of the pen, — he became the fashion and was 
unmistakably the lion of the season. From the mo- 
ment when he landed at Liverpool he found himself 
encircled by friends. The attentions paid to him were 
never formal or perfunctory. He was admitted to the 
homes of the greatest Englishmen, and was there made 
free of that delightful hospitality which Englishmen 
reserve for the chosen few. No sooner had he reached 
London than he was showered with cards of invitation 
to the greatest houses, and with letters couched in 
terms of personal friendship. Sir Charles Lyell, his 
old acquaintance, welcomed him to London a few 
hours after his arrival. The American Minister, Mr. 
Abbott Lawrence, 1 begged him to be present at a dip- 
lomatic dinner. In company of the Lyells he was 
taken at once to an evening party where he met Lord 

1 The father of Mr. James Lawrence, who afterward married 
Prescott's daughter Elizabeth. See p. 97, 



104 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

Palmerston, then Premier, and other members of the 
Ministry. Lord Carlisle greeted him in a fashion 
strangely foreign to English reserve, for he threw 
his arms around Prescott, making the historian blush 
like a great girl. It would be tedious to recount the 
unbroken series of brilliant entertainments at which 
Prescott was the guest of honour. His letters written 
at this time from England are full of interesting and 
often amusing bits of description, and they show that 
even his exceptional social honours were very far from 
turning his head. In fact, he viewed the whole thing 
as a diverting show, except when the warmth of the 
personal welcome touched his heart. Through it all 
he was the self-poised American, never losing his 
native sense of humour. He made friends with Sir 
Eobert Peel, who, at their first meeting, addressed him 
in French, having taken him for the French dramatist 
M. Scribe ! He chatted often with the Duke of Well- 
ington, and described him in a comparison which makes 
one smile because it is so Yankee-like and Bostonese. 

" In the crowd I saw an old gentleman, very nicely made 
up, stooping a good deal, very much decorated with orders, 
and making his way easily along, as all, young and old, 
seemed to treat him with deference. It was the Duke — the 
old Iron Duke — and I thought myself lucky in this oppor- 
tunity of seeing him. ... He paid me some pretty compli- 
ments on which I grew vain at once, and I did my best to 
repay him in coin that had no counterfeit in it. He is a 
striking figure, reminding me a good deal of Colonel Perkins 
in his general air." 

Prescott attended the races at Ascot with the Ameri- 
can and Swedish Ministers, was the guest of Sir Eobert 
Peel, and was presented at Court — a ceremony which 
he described to Mrs. Prescott in a very lively letter. 



vi.] THE LAST TEN YEARS 105 

" I was at Lawrence's, at one, in my costume : a chapeau 
with gold lace, blue coat, and white trousers, begilded with 
buttons and metal, — a sword and patent leather boots. I 
was a figure indeed! But I had enough to keep me in 
countenance. I spent an hour yesterday with Lady M. get- 
ting instructions for demeaning myself. The greatest dan- 
ger was that I should be tripped up by my own sword. . . . 
The company were at length permitted one by one to pass 
into the presence chamber — a room with a throne and 
gorgeous canopy at the farther end, before which stood the 
little Queen of the mighty Isle and her Consort, surrounded 
by her ladies-in-waiting. She was rather simply dressed, 
but he was in a Field Marshal's uniform, and covered, I should 
think, with all the orders of Europe. He is a good-looking 
person, but by no means so good-looking as the portraits of 
him. The Queen is better-looking than you might expect. 
I w^as presented by our Minister, according to the directions 
of the Chamberlain, as the historian of Ferdinand and 
Isabella, in due form — and made my profound obeisance 
to her Majesty, who made a very dignified curtesy, as she 
made to some two hundred others who were presented in 
like manner. I made the same low bow to his Princeship to 
whom I was also presented, and so bowed myself out of the 
royal circle, without my sword tripping up the heels of my 
nobility. . . . Lord Carlisle . . . said he had come to the 
drawing-room to see how I got through the affair, which 
he thought I did without any embarrassment. Indeed, to say 
truth, I have been more embarrassed a hundred times in my 
life than I was here. I don't know why ; I suppose because 
I am getting old." 

Somewhat later, while Prescott was a guest at Castle 
Howard, where the Queen was also entertained, he had 
something more to tell about her. 

" At eight we went to dinner all in full dress, but mourn- 
ing for the Duke of Cambridge ; I, of course, for President 
Taylor I All wore breeches or tight pantaloons. It was a 
brilliant show, I assure you — that immense table with its 
fruits and flowers and lights glancing over beautiful plate 



106 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

and in that snperb gallery. I was as near the Queen as at 
our own family table. She has a good appetite and laughs 
merrily. She has fine eyes and teeth, but is short. She 
was dressed in black silk and lace with the blue scarf of 
the Order of the Garter across her bosom. Her only orna- 
ments were of jet. The Prince, who is certainly a hand- 
some and very well made man, wore the Garter with its 
brilliant buckle round his knee, a showy star on his breast, 
and the collar of a foreign order round his neck. 

" In the evening we listened to some fine music and the 
Queen examined the pictures. Odd enough the etiquette. 
Lady Carlisle, who did the honours like a high-bred lady as 
she is, and the Duchess of Sutherland, were the only ladies 
who talked with her Majesty. Lord Carlisle, her host, was 
the only gentleman who did so unless she addressed a per- 
son herself. No one can sit a moment when she chooses to 
stand. She did me the honour to come and talk with me — 
asking me about my coming here, my stay in the Castle, 
what I was doing now in the historic way, how Everett was 
and where he was — for ten minutes or so; and Prince 
Albert afterwards a long while, talking about the houses 
and ruins in England, and the churches in Belgium, and the 
pictures in the room, and I don't know what. I found my- 
self now and then trenching on the rules by interrupting, 
etc. ; but I contrived to make it up by a respectful ' Your 
Royal Highness,' ' Your Majesty,' etc. I told the Queen of 
the pleasure I had in finding rnyself in a land of friends 
instead of foreigners — a sort of stereotype with me — and 
of my particular good fortune in being under the roof with 
her. She is certainly very much of a lady in her manner, 
with a sweet voice." 

At Oxford, Prescott was the guest of the Bishop, 
the well-known Wilberforce, popularly known by his 
sobriquet of " Soapy Sam." The University conferred 
upon the American historian the degree of D.C.L. in 
spite of the fact that he was a Unitarian. This circum- 
stance was known and caused some slight difficulty, 
but possibly the degree given to Everett, another 



vi. 1 THE LAST TEN YEARS 107 

Unitarian, some years before in spite of great opposi- 
tion, was regarded as having established a precedent ; 
and Oxford cherishes the cult of precedent. At the 
Bishop's house, however, Prescott shocked a lady by 
telling her of his creed. He wrote to Ticknor : " The 
term [Unitarian] is absolutely synonymous in a large 
party here with Infidel, Jew, Mohammedan; worse 
even, because regarded as a wolf in sheep's clothing." 
The lady, however, succeeded in giving Prescott a 
shock in return; for when he happened to mention 
Dr. Channing, she told him that she had never even 
heard the man's name — a sort of ignorance which to 
a Bostonian was quite incomprehensible. 

Prescott's account of the university ceremonial is 
given in a letter to Mr. Ticknor. 

" Lord Northampton and I were doctorised in due form. 
We were both dressed in flaming red robes (it was the hot- 
test day I have felt here), and then marched out in solemn 
procession with the Faculty, etc., in their black and red gowns 
through the public streets. . . . We were marched up the 
aisle ; Professor Phillimore made a long Latin exposition of 
our merits, in which each of the adjectives ended, as Southey 
said in reference to himself on a like occasion, in issimus ; 
and amidst the cheers of the audience we were converted 
into Doctors." 

Prescott was much pleased with this Oxford degree, 
which rightly seemed to him more significant than the 
like honours which had come to him from various Ameri- 
can colleges. " Now," said he, "lama real Doctor." 

In the same letter he gives a little picture of 
Lord Brougham during a debate in the House of 
Lords. Brougham was denouncing Baron Bunsen 
for his course in the Schleswig-Holstein affair, — 
Bunsen being in the House at the time. 



108 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

" What will interest you is the assault made so brutally 
by Brougham on your friend Bunsen. I was present and 
never saw anything so coarse as his personalities. He said 
the individual [Bunsen] took up the room of two ladies. 
Bunsen is rather fat as also Madame and his daughter — 
all of whom at last marched out of the gallery, but not until 
eyes and glasses had been directed to the spot to make out 
the unfortunate individuals, while Lord Brougham was fly- 
ing up and down, thumping the table with his fists and 
foaming at the mouth till all his brother peers, including 
the old Duke, were in convulsions of laughter. I dined with 
Bunsen and Madame the same day at Ford's." 

Prescott met both Disraeli and Gladstone, and, 
among other more purely literary men, Macaulay, 
Lockhart, Hallam, Thirlwall, Milman, and Eogers. 
Of Macaulay he tells some interesting things. 

" I have met him several times, and breakfasted with him 
the other morning. His memory for quotations and illus- 
tration is a miracle — quite disconcerting. He comes to a 
talk like one specially crammed. Yet you may start the 
topic. He told me he should be delivered of twins on his 
next publication, which would not be till '53. . . . Macau- 
lay's first draught — very unlike Scott's — is absolutely illeg- 
ible from erasures and corrections. . . . He tells me he has 
his moods for writing. When not in the vein, he does not 

press it. . . . H told me that Lord Jeffrey once told him 

that, having tripped up Macaulay in a quotation from Paradise 
Lost, two days after, Macaulay came to him and said, * You 
will not catch me again in the Paradise. 9 At which Jeffrey 
opened the volume and took him up in a great number of 
passages at random, in all of which he went on correctly 
repeating the original. Was it not a miraculous tour 
d' esprit? Macaulay does not hesitate to say now that he 
thinks he could restore the first six or seven books of the 
Paradise in case they were lost." 

Still again, Prescott expresses his astonishment at 
Macaulay's memory. 



vi] THE LAST TEN YEARS 109 

M Macaulay is the most of a miracle. II is tours in the way 
of memory stagger belief. . . . His talk is like the laboured, 
but still unintermitting, jerks of a pump. But it is anything 
but wishy-washy. It keeps the mind, however, on too great 
a tension for table-talk." 

Writing of Samuel Rogers, who was now a very old 
man, he records a characteristic little anecdote. 

u I have seen Rogers several times, that is, all that is out 
of the bedclothes. His talk is still sauce piquante. The best 

thing on record of his late sayings is his reply to Lady , 

who at a dinner table, observing him speaking to a lady, 
said, ' I hope, Mr. Rogers, you are not attacking me.' 

* Attacking you ! ' he said, ' why, my dear Lady , I 

have been all my life defending you.' Wit could go no 
further." 

Prescott was the guest of the Duke of Sutherland 
at Trentham and at Stafford House. He was invited 
to Lord Lansdowne's, the Duke of Northumberland's, 
the Duke of Argyle's, and to Lord Grey's, and he de- 
scribes himself in one letter as up to his ears in dances, 
dinners, and breakfasts. This sort of life, with all its 
glitter and gayety, suited Prescott wonderfully well, 
and his health improved daily. He remarked, how- 
ever : " It is a life which, were I an Englishman, I 
should not desire a great deal of ; two months at most ; 
although I think, on the whole, the knowledge of a 
very curious state of society and of so many interest- 
ing and remarkable characters, well compensate the 
bore of a voyage. Yet I am quite sure, having once 
had this experience, nothing would ever induce me to 
repeat it, as I have heard you say it would not pay." 
Some little personal notes and memoranda may also 
be quoted. 



110 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

u Everything is drawn into the vortex, and there they swim 
round and round, so that you may revolve for weeks and not 
meet a familiar face half a dozen times. Yet there is monot- 
ony in some things — that everlasting turbot and shrimp 
sauce. I shall never abide a turbot again." 

il Do you know, by the way, that I have become a court- 
ier and affect the royal presence ? I wish you could see my 
gallant costume, gold-laced coat, white inexpressibles, silk 
hose, gold-buckled patent slippers, sword and chapeau. Am 
I not playing the fool as well as my betters? " 

" A silly woman . . . said when I told her it was thirty 
years since I was here, 'Pooh! you are not more than 
thirty years old.' And on my repeating it, she still in- 
sisted on the same flattering ejaculation. The Bishop of 
London the other day with his amiable family told me they 
had settled my age at forty. ... So I am convinced there 
has been some error in the calculation. Ask mother how it 
is. They say here that gray hair, particularly whiskers, 
may happen to anybody even under thirty. On the whole, 
I am satisfied that I am the youngest of the family." 

Writing to his daughter from Alnwick Castle, the 
seat of the Duke of Northumberland, Prescott gave a 
little instance of his own extreme sensibility. A great 
number of children were being entertained by the Duke 
and Duchess. 

" As they all joined in the beautiful anthem, ' God save 
the Queen,' the melody of the little voices rose up so clear 
and simple in the open courtyard that everybody was touched. 
Though I had nothing to do with the anthem, some of my 
opera tears, 1 dear Lizzie, came into my eyes, and did me great 
credit with some of the John and Jennie Bulls by whom I 
was surrounded." 

When he left Alnwick : — 

" My friendly hosts remonstrated on my departure, as they 
had requested me to make them a long visit ; and ' I never 

1 Alluding to the fact that he always shed tears at the opera. 



vi] THE LAST TEN YEARS 111 

say what I do not mean,' said the Duke, in an honest way. 
And when I thanked him for his hospitable welcome, ' It is 
no more,' he said, ' than you should meet in every house 
in England.' That was hearty." 

The letters written by Prescott while in Europe 
are marked also by evidences of the beautiful affec- 
tion w T hich he cherished for his wife, of whom he 
once said, many years after their marriage: "Contrary 
to the assertion of La Bruyere — w r ho somewhere says 
that the most fortunate husband finds reason to regret 
his condition at least once in twenty-four hours — I 
may truly say that I have found no such day in the 
quarter of a century that Providence has spared us to 
each other." In the letters written by him during this 
English visit, there remain, even after the ruthless 
editing done by Ticknor, passages that are touching in 
their unaffected tenderness. 

Thus, from London, June 14, 1850 : — 

u Why have I no letter on my table from home ? I trust 
I shall find one there this evening, or I shall, after all, have 
a heavy heart, which is far from gay in this gayety." 

And the following from Antwerp, July 23, 1850 : — 

"Dear Susan, I never see anything beautiful in nature 
or art, or hear heart-stirring music in the churches — the 
only place where music does stir my heart — without think- 
ing of you and wishing you could be by my side, if only for 
a moment." 

When Prescott returned from this, his last visit to 
Europe, he found himself at the very zenith of his fame. 
In every respect, his position was most enviable. The 
union of critical approval with popular applause — a 
thing which is so rare in the experience of authors — 
had been fairly won by him. His books were accepted 



112 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

as authoritative, while they were read by thousands 
who never looked into the pages of other historians. 
Even a volume of miscellaneous essays 1 which he had 
collected from his stray contributions to the North 
American, and which had been published in England 
by Bentley in 1845, had succeeded with the public on 
both sides of the Atlantic. He had the prestige of a 
very flattering foreign recognition, and his friendships 
embraced some of the best-known men and women in 
Great Britain and the United States. It may seem 
odd that the letters and other writings of his contem- 
poraries seldom contain more than a mere casual 
mention of him ; but the explanation of this is to be 
found in the disposition of Prescott himself. As a 
man, and in his social intercourse outside of his own 
family, he was so thoroughly well-bred, so far from 
anything resembling eccentricity, and so averse from 
literary pose, as to afford no material for gossip 
or indeed for special comment. In this respect, his 
life resembled his writings. There was in each a 
noticeable absence of the piquant, or the sensational. 
He pleased by his manners as by his pen; but he 
possessed no mannerisms such as are sometimes sup- 
posed to be the hall-marks of originality. Hence, one 
finds no mass of striking anecdotes collected and sent 
about by those who knew him; any more than in his 
writing one chances upon startling strokes of style. 
Prescott, however, had his own very definite opin- 

1 The English title of this book was Critical and Historical 
Essays. It contained twelve papers and also the life of Charles 
Brockden Brown already mentioned (p. 65) . The American edition 
bore the title Biographical and Critical Miscellanies. It has been 
several times reprinted, the last issue appearing in Philadelphia in 
1882. 



vi.] THE LAST TEN YEARS 113 

ions concerning his contemporaries, though they were 
always expressed in kindly words. To Irving he was 
especially attracted because of a certain likeness of 
temperament between them. His sensitive nature felt 
all the nuances of Irving's delicate style, especially 
when it was used for pathetic effects. "You have 
read Irving's Memoirs of Miss Davidson/' he once 
wrote to Miss Ticknor. " Did you ever meet with any 
novel half so touching ? It is the most painful book I 
ever listened to. I hear it from the children and we 
all cry over it together. What a little flower of Para- 
dise ! " Yet he could accurately criticise his friend's 
productions. 1 Longfellow was another of Prescott' s 
associates, and his ballads of the sea were favourites. 
Mr. T. W. Higginson quotes Prescott as saying that 
The Skeleton in Armor and TJie Wreck of the Hes- 
perus were the best imaginative poetry since Cole- 
ridge. Of Byron he wrote, in 1840, some sentences to 
a friend which condense very happily the opinion that 
has finally come to be accepted. Indeed, Prescott 
shows in his private letters a critical gift which one 
seldom finds in his published essays — a judgment at 
once shrewd, clear-sighted, and sensible. 

" I think one is apt to talk very extravagantly of his 
[Byron's] poetry; for it is the poetry of passion and carries 
away the sober judgment. It defies criticism from its very 
nature, being lawless, independent of all rules, sometimes of 
grammar, and even of common sense. When he means to 
be strong he is often affected, violent, morbid. . . . But 
then there is, with all this smoke and fustian, a deep sensi- 
bility to the sublime and beautiful in nature, a wonderful 
melody, or rather harmony, of language, consisting ... in a 
variety — the variety of nature — in which startling rugged- 
ness is relieved by soft and cultivated graces." 
1 Infra, p. 134. 



114 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

Probably the most pungent bit of literary comment 
that Prescott ever wrote is found in a letter of his ad- 
dressed to Bancroft, x who had sent him a copy of Car- 
lyle's French Revolution. The clangour and fury of 
this book could hardly fail to jar upon the nerves of so 
decorously classical a writer as Prescott. 

" I return you Carlyle with my thanks. I have read as 
much of him as I could stand. After a very candid desire 
to relish him, I must say I do not at all. The French Revo- 
lution is a most lamentable comedy and requires nothing 
but the simplest statement of facts to freeze one's blood. 
To attempt to colour so highly what nature has already over- 
coloured is, it appears to me, in very bad taste and produces 
a grotesque and ludicrous effect. . . . Then such ridiculous 
affectations of new-fangled words ! Carlyle is ever a bungler 
in his own business ; for his creations or rather combinations 
are the most discordant and awkward possible. As he runs 
altogether for dramatic or rather picturesque effect, he is not 
to be challenged, I suppose, for want of refined views. This 
forms no part of his plan. His views, certainly, so far as 
I can estimate them, are trite enough. And, in short, the 
whole thing . . . both as to forme and to fond, is perfectly 
contemptible." 

Of Thackeray, Prescott saw quite a little during the 
novelist's visit to America in 1852-1853, and several 
times entertained him. He did not greatly care for the 
lectures on the English humorists, which, as Thackeray 
confided to Prescctt, caused America to "rain dollars." 
" I do not think he made much of an impression as a 
critic, but the Thackeray vein is rich in what is better 
than cold criticism." Thackeray on his side expresses 
his admiration for Prescott in the opening sentences 
of The Virginians, though without naming him : — 

i November 1, 1838. 



vi] THE LAST TEN YEARS 115 

"On the library wall of one of the most famous writers 
of America, there hang two crossed swords, which his rela- 
tives wore in the great war of Independence. The one sword 
was gallantly drawn in the service of the King; the other 
was the weapon of a brave and humane republican soldier. 
The possessor of the harmless trophy has earned for him- 
self a name alike honoured in his ancestor's country and 
his own, where genius like his has always a peaceful wel- 
come." 

This little tribute pleased Prescott very much, and 
he wrote to Lady Lyell asking her to get Tfie Virgin- 
ians and read the passage, which, as he says, " was very 
prettily done." On the whole, however, he seems to 
have preferred Dickens to Thackeray, being deceived 
by the very superficial cynicism affected by the latter. 
But in fiction, his prime favourites were always Scott 
and Dumas, whose books he never tired of hearing 
read. Thus, in mature age, the tastes of his boyhood 
continued to declare themselves; and few days ever 
passed without an hour or two devoted to the magic of 
romance. 

During the winter following his return from Europe, 
which he spent in Boston, he found it difficult to settle 
down to work again, and not until the autumn did he 
wholly resume his life of literary activity. After doing 
so, however, he worked rapidly, so that the first volume 
of Philip II was completed in April, 1852. It was very 
well received, in fact, as warmly as any of his earlier 
w r ork, and the same was true of the second volume, which 
appeared in 1854. Prescott himself said that he was 
" a little nervous " about the success of the book, inas- 
much as a long interval had elapsed since the publica- 
tion of his Peru, and he feared lest the public might 
have lost its interest in him. The result, however, 



116 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

showed that he need not have felt any apprehension. 
Within six months after the second volume had been 
published, more than eight thousand copies were 
sold in the United States, and probably an equal num- 
ber in England. Moreover, interest was revived in 
Prescott's preceding histories, so that nearly thirty 
thousand volumes of them were taken by the public 
within a year or two. There was the same favourable 
consensus of critical opinion regarding Philip IL f 
and it received the honour of a notice from the pen 
of M. Guizot in the Edinburgh Review. 

In bringing out this last work Prescott had changed 
his publishers, — not, however, because of any dis- 
agreement with the Messrs. Harper, with whom his 
relations had always been most satisfactory, and of 
whom he always spoke in terms of high regard. But a 
Boston firm, Messrs. Sampson, Phillips and Company, 
had made him an offer more advantageous than the 
Harpers felt themselves justified in doing. In another 
sense the change might have been fortunate for Pres- 
cott, inasmuch as the warehouse of the Harpers was 
destroyed by fire in 1853. In this fire were consumed 
several thousand copies of Prescott's earlier books, 
for which payment had been already made. Prescott, 
however, with his usual generosity, permitted the 
Harpers to print for their own account as many 
copies as had been lost. In England his publishing 
arrangements were somewhat less favourable than 
hitherto. When he had made his earlier contracts 
with Bentley, it was supposed that the English pub- 
lisher could claim copyright in works written by a 
foreigner. A decision of the House of Lords adverse 
to such a view had now been rendered, and therefore 



vi. ] THE LAST TEN YEARS 117 

Mr. Bentley could receive no advantage through an 
arrangement with Prescott other than such as might 
come to him from securing the advance sheets and 
from thus being first in the field. As a matter of fact, 
Philip II was brought out in four separate editions in 
Great Britain. In Germany it was twice reprinted in 
the original and once in a German translation. A 
French version was brought out in Paris by Didot, 
and a Spanish one in Madrid. Prescott himself 
wrote : — 

"I have received $17,000 for the Philip and the other 
works the last six months. . . . From the tone of the foreign 
journals and those of my own country, it would seem that 
the work has found quite as much favour as any of its prede- 
cessors, and the sales have been much greater than any other 
of them in the same space of time." 

Later, writing to Bancroft, he said : — 

" The book has gone off very well so far. Indeed, double 
the quantity, I think, has been sold of any of my preceding 
works in the same time. I have been lucky, too, in getting 
well on before Macaulay has come thundering along the track 
with his hundred horse-power." 

While engaged in the composition of Philip IL, Pres- 
cott had undertaken to write a continuation of Rob- 
ertson's History of Charles V. He had been asked 
to prepare an entirely new work upon the reign of 
that monarch, but this seemed too arduous a task. 
He therefore rewrote the conclusion of Robertson's 
book — a matter of some hundred and eighty pages. 
This he began in the spring of 1855, and finished 
it during the following year. It was published on 
December 8, 1856, on which day he wrote to Tick- 
nor : " My Charles the Fifth, or rather Robertson's with 



118 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

my Continuation, made his bow to-day, like a strapping 
giant with a little urchin holding on to the tail of his 
coat." x At about the same time Prescott prepared 
a brief memoir of Mr. Abbott Lawrence, the father 
of his daughter's husband. This was printed for 
private distribution. 

During the year which followed, Prescott's health 
began steadily to fail. He suffered from violent pains 
in the head ; so severe as to rob him of sleep and to 
make work of any kind impossible. He still, however, 
enjoyed intervals when he could laugh and jest in his 
old careless way, and even at times indulge in the 
pleasant little dinners which he loved to share with 
his most intimate friends. On February 4th, however, 
while walking in the street, he was stricken down by 
an apoplectic seizure, which solved the mystery of his 
severe headaches. When he recovered consciousness 
his first words were, " My poor wife ! I am so sorry 
for you that this has come upon you so soon." The 
attack was a warning rather than an instant summons. 
After a few days he was once more himself, except 
that his enunciation never again became absolutely 
clear. Serious work, of course, was out of the ques- 
tion. He listened to a good deal of reading, chiefly 
fiction. He was put upon a very careful regimen in 
the matter of diet, and wrote, with a touch of rueful 
amusement, of the vegetarian meals to which he was 
restricted: "I have been obliged to exchange my 
carnivorous propensities for those of a more innocent 
and primitive nature, picking up my fare as our good 
parents did before the Fall." Improving somewhat, he 

1 Nearly seven thousand copies of this book had been taken up 
before the end of the following three years. 



vi] THE LAST TEN YEARS 119 

completed the third volume of Philip II ; not so fully 
as he had intended, but mainly putting together so 
much of it as had already been prepared. The book 
was printed in April, 1858, and the supervision of the 
proof-sheets afforded him some occupation, as did also 
the making of a few additional notes for a new edition 
of the Conquest of Mexico. The summer of 1858 he 
spent in Pepperell, returning to Boston in October, in 
the hope of once more taking up his studies. He did, 
in fact, linger wistfully over his books and manu- 
scripts, but accomplished very little; for, soon after 
the New Year, there came the end of all his labours. 
On January 27th, his health was apparently in a satis- 
factory condition. He listened to his secretary, Mr. 
Kirk, read from one of Sala's books of travel, and, in 
order to settle a question which arose in the course of 
the reading, he left the library to speak to his wife and 
sister. Leaving them a moment later with a laugh, 
he went into an adjoining room, where presently he 
was heard to groan. His secretary hurried to his side, 
and found him quite unconscious. In the early after- 
noon he died, without knowing that the end had 
come. 

Prescott had always dreaded the thought of being 
buried alive. His vivid imagination had shown him 
the appalling horror of a living burial. Again and 
again he had demanded of those nearest him that he 
should be shielded from the possibility of such a fate. 
Therefore, when the physicians had satisfied them- 
selves that life had really left him, a large vein was 
severed, to make assurance doubly sure. 

On the last day of January he was buried in the 
family tomb, in the crypt of St. Paul's. Men and 



120 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. vi. 

women of every rank and station were present at the 
simple ceremony. The Legislature of the State had 
adjourned so that its members might pay their tribute 
of respect to so distinguished a citizen. The His- 
torical Society was represented among the mourners. 
His personal friends and those of humble station, 
whom he had so often befriended, filled the body of 
the church. Before his burial, his remains, in accord- 
ance with a wish of his that was well known, had 
been carried to the room in which were his beloved 
books and where so many imperishable pages had been 
written. There, as it were, he lay in state. It is thus 
that one may best, in thought, take leave of him, amid 
the memorials and records of a past which he had 
made to live again. 



CHAPTER VII 

" FERDINAND AND ISABELLA " — PRESCOTT's STYLE 

The History of Ferdinand and Isabella is best regarded 
as Prescott's initiation into the writing of historical 
literature. It was a prolusio, a preliminary trial of 
his powers, in some respects an apprenticeship to the 
profession which he had decided to adopt. When he 
began its composition he had published nothing but 
a few casual reviews. He had neither acquired a 
style nor gained that self-confidence which does so 
much to command success. No such work as this had 
as yet been undertaken by an American. How far he 
could himself overcome the peculiar difficulties which 
confronted him was quite uncertain. Whether he had 
it in him to be at once a serious investigator and a 
maker of literature, he did not know. Therefore, the 
Ferdinand and Isabella shows here and there an un- 
certainty of touch and a lack of assured method such 
as were quite natural in one who had undertaken so 
ambitious a task with so little technical experience. 

In the matter of style, Prescott had not yet emanci- 
pated himself from that formalism which had been 
inherited from the eighteenth-century writers, and 
which Americans, with the wonted conservatism of 
provincials, retained long after Englishmen had begun 
to write with naturalness and simplicity. Even in 
fiction this circumstance is noticeable. At a time 

121 



122 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

when Scott was thrilling the whole world of English 
readers with his vivid romances, written hastily and 
often carelessly, in a style which reflected his own in- 
dividual nature, Cooper was producing stories equally 
exciting, but told in phraseology almost as stilted as that 
which we find in Rasselas. This was no less true in 
poetry. The great romantic movement which in Eng- 
land found expression in Byron and Shelley and the 
exquisitely irregular metres of Coleridge had as yet 
awakened no true responsive echo on this side of the 
Atlantic. Among the essay-writers and historians of 
America none had summoned up the courage to shake 
off the Addisonian and Johnsonian fetters and to move 
with free, unstudied ease. Irving was but a later Gold- 
smith, and Bancroft a Yankee Gibbon. The papers 
which then appeared in the North American Review, to 
whose pages Prescott himself was a regular contributor, 
give ample evidence that the literary models of the time 
were those of an earlier age, — an age in which dig- 
nity was supposed to lie in ponderosity and to be 
incompatible with grace. 

Prescott's nature was not one that had the slightest 
sympathy with pedantry. No more spontaneous spirit 
than his can be imagined. His joyousness and gayety 
sometimes even tended toward the frivolous. Yet in 
this first serious piece of historical writing, he imposed 
upon himself the shackles of an earlier convention. 
Just because his mood prompted him to write in an 
unstudied style, all the more did he feel it necessary 
to repress his natural inclination. Therefore, in the 
text of his history, we find continual evidence of the 
eighteenth-century literary manner, — the balanced 
sentence, the inevitable adjective, the studied antithe- 



vii.] PRESOOTTS STYLE 123 

sis, and the elaborate parallel. Women are invari- 
ably " females " ; a gift is a " donative " ; a marriage 
does not take place, but " nuptials are solemnized " ; 
a name is usually an u appellation w ; a crown u de- 
volves " upon a successor ; a poet u delivers his 
sentiments"; a king "avails himself of indetermi- 
nateness"; and so on. A cumbrous sentence like the 
following smacks of the sort of English that was soon 
to pass away : — 

" Fanaticism is so far subversive of the most established 
principles of morality that under the dangerous maxim ' For 
the advancement of the faith all means are lawful/ which 
Tasso has rightly, though perhaps undesignedly, derived from 
the spirits of hell, it not only excuses but enjoins the com- 
mission of the most revolting crime as a sacred duty." * 

And the following : — 

" Casiri's multifarious catalogue bears ample testimony to 
the emulation with which not only men but even females of 
the highest rank devoted themselves to letters ; the latter 
contending publicly for the prizes, not merely in eloquence 
and poetry, but in those recondite studies which have usually 
been reserved for the other sex." 2 

The style of these sentences is essentially the style 
of the old North American Review and of eighteenth- 
century England. The particular chapter from which 
the last quotation has been taken was, in fact, origi- 
nally prepared by Prescott for the North American, as 
already mentioned, 3 and was only on second thought 
reserved for a chapter of the history. 

The passion for parallel, which had existed among 
historical writers ever since the time of Plutarch, was 
responsible for the elaborate comparison which Pres- 

i i. p. 268. a i. p. 285, * Supra, p. 65. 



124 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

cott makes between Isabella and Elizabeth of England. 1 
It is worked out relentlessly — Isabella and Elizabeth 
in their private lives, Isabella and Elizabeth in their 
characters, Isabella and Elizabeth in the selection 
of their ministers of State, Isabella and Elizabeth in 
their intellectual power, Isabella and Elizabeth in 
their respective deaths. Prescott drags it all in ; and 
it affords evidence of the literary standards of his 
countrymen at the time, that this laboured parallel was 
thought to be the very finest thing in the whole book. 
If, however, Prescott maintained in the body of his 
text the rigid lapidary dignity which he thought to be 
appropriate, his natural liveliness found occasional ex- 
pression in the numerous foot-notes, which at times he 
wrote somewhat in the vein of his private letters from 
Pepperell and Nahant. The contrast, therefore, be- 
tween text and notes was often thoroughly incongru- 
ous because so violent. This led his English reviewer, 
Mr. Eichard Eord, 2 to write some rather acrid sentences 
that in their manner suggest the tone which, in our 
days, the Saturday Review has always taken with new 
authors, especially when they happen to be American. 
Wrote Mr. Ford of Prescott : — 

" His style is too often sesquipedalian and ornate ; the 
stilty, wordy, false taste of Dr. Channing without his depth 
of thought; the sugar and sack of Washington Irving without 
the half -penny worth of bread — without his grace and polish 
of pure, grammatical, careful Anglicism. We have many 
suspicions, indeed, from his ordinary quotations, from what 
he calls in others ' the cheap display of school-boy erudition/ 
and from sundry lurking sneers, that he has not drunk deeply 
at the Pierian fountains, which taste the purer the higher 

1 iii. pp. 199-204. 

2 In the British Quarterly Review, lxiv (1839). 



vii.] PRE8C0TFS STYLE 125 

rack them to their source. The.se, the only sure founda- 
tions of a pure and correct style, are absolutely necessary to 
our Transatlantic brethren, who are unfortunately deprived 
of the high standing example of an order of nobility, and of 
a metropolis where local peculiarities evaporate. The ele- 

l tone of the classics is the only corrective for their 
unhappy democracy. Moral feeling must of necessity be 
degraded wherever the multitude are the sole dispensers of 
power and honour. All candidates for the foul-breathed uni- 
versal suffrage must lower their appeal to base understand- 
ings and base motives. The authors of the United States, 
independently of the deteriorating influence of their institu- 
tions, can of all people the least afford to be negligent. Far 
severed from the original spring of English undefiled, they 
always run the risk of sinking into provincialisms, into 
Patavinity, — both positive, in the use of obsolete words, and 
the adoption of conventional village significations, which 
differ from those retained by us, — as well as negative, in the 
omission of those happy expressions w^hich bear the fire-new 
stamp of the only authorised mint. Instances occur con- 
stantly in these volumes where the word is English, but 
English returned after many years' transportation. We do 
not wish to be hypercritical, nor to strain at gnats. If, how- 
ever, the authors of the United States aspire to be admitted 
ad eundem, they must write the English of the ' old country,' 
which they will find it is much easier to forget and corrupt 
than to improve. We cannot, however, afford space here for 
a florilegium Yankyense. A professor from New York, newly 
imported into England and introduced into real good society, 
of which previously he can only have formed an abstract 
idea, is no bad illustration of Mr. Prescott's over-done text. 
Like the stranger in question, he is always on his best be- 
haviour, prim, prudish, and stiff-necky, afraid of self-com- 
mittal, ceremonious, remarkably dignified, supporting the 
honour of the United States, and monstrously afraid of being 
laughed at. Some of these travellers at last discover that 
bows and starch are not even the husk of a gentleman ; and 
so, on re-crossing the Atlantic, their manner becomes like 
Mr. Prescott's notes ; levity is mistaken for ease, an un-' per- 



126 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

tinent ' familiarity for intimacy, second-rate low-toned * jocu- 
larities ' (which make no one laugh but the retailer) for 
the light, hair-trigger repartee, the brilliancy of high-bred 
pleasantry. Mr. Prescott emulates Dr. Channing in his text, 
Dr. Dunham and Mr. Joseph Miller in his notes. Judging 
from the facetiae which, by his commending them as < good,' 
have furnished a gauge to measure his capacity for relishing 
humour, we are convinced that his non-perception of wit is 
so genuine as to be organic. It is perfectly allowable to rise 
occasionally from the ludicrous into the serious, but to de- 
scend from history to the bathos of balderdash is too bad — 
risu inepto nihil ineptius" 

This passage, which is an amusing example of an over- 
flow of High Tory bile, does not by any means fairly 
represent the general tone of Ford's review. Prescott 
had here and there indulged himself in some of the 
commonplaces of republicanism such as were usual in 
American writings of that time ; and these harmlessly- 
trite political pedantries had rasped the nerves of his 
British reviewer. To speak of "the empty decora- 
tions, the stars and garters of an order of nobility," to 
mention " royal perfidy," " royal dissimulation," "royal 
recompense of ingratitude," and generally to intimate 
that "the people" were superior to royalty and nobil- 
ity, roused a spirit of antagonism in the mind of Mr. 
Ford. Several of Prescott' s semi-facetious notes dealt 
with rank and aristocracy in something of the same 
hold-cheap tone, so that Ford was irritated into a very 
personal retort He wrote : — 

11 These pleasantries come with a bad grace from the son, 
as we learn from a full-length dedication, of i the Honour- 
able William Prescott, LL.D.' We really are ignorant of the 
exact value of this titular potpourri in a soi-disant land of 
equality, of these noble and academic plumes, borrowed 
from the wing of a professedly despised monarchy." 



til] PRESCOTT'S STYLE 127 

Although Ford's characterisation of Prescott's style 
had some basis of truth, it was, of course, grossly 
exaggerated. Throughout the whole of the Ferdinand 
and Lobelia, one is conscious of a strong tendency 
toward simplicity of expression. Many passages are 
as easy and unaffected as any that we find in an histori- 
cal writer of to-day. Eeading the pages over now, one 
can see the true Prescott under all the starch and 
stiffness which at the time he mistakenly regarded as 
essential to the dignity of historical writing. In fact, 
as the work progressed, the author gained something 
of that ease which comes from practice, and wrote 
more and more simply and more after his own natural 
manner. What is really lacking is sharpness of outline. 
The narrative is somewhat too flowing. One misses, 
now and then, crispness of phrase and force of character- 
isation. Prescott never wrote a sentence that can be re- 
membered. His strength lies in his ensemble, in the 
general effect, and in the agreeable manner in which he 
carries us along with him from the beginning to the end. 
This first book of his, from the point of view of style, is 
"pleasant reading." Its movement is that of an am- 
bling palfrey, well broken to a lady's use. Nowhere have 
we the sensation of the rush and thunder of a war-horse. 

Ford's strictures made Prescott wince, or, as Mr. 
Ticknor gently puts it, " disturbed his equanimity." 
They caused him to consider the question of his own 
style in the light of Ford's very slashing strictures. In 
making this self-examination Prescott was perfectly 
candid with himself, and he noted down the conclu- 
sions which he ultimately reached. 

" It seems to me the first and sometimes the second vol- 
ume afford examples of the use of words not so simple as 



128 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

might be ; not objectionable in themselves, but unless some- 
thing is gained in the way of strength or of colouring it is 
best to use the most simple, unnoticeable words to express 
ordinary things ; e.g. ' to send ' is better than ' to transmit ' ; 
' crown descended ' better than i devolved ' ; ' guns fired ' 
than i guns discharged ' ; ' to name/ or 'call,' than * to nomi- 
nate ' ; ' to read ' than ' peruse ' ; < the term/ or < name/ than 
i appellation/ and so forth. It is better also not to encum- 
ber the sentence with long, lumbering nouns ; as, i the re- 
linquishment of/ instead of ' relinquishing ' ; * the embellish- 
ment and fortification of/ instead of 'embellishing and 
fortifying ' ; and so forth. I can discern no other warrant 
for Master Ford's criticism than the occasional use of these 
and similar words on such commonplace matters as would 
make the simpler forms of expression preferable. In my 
third volume, I do not find the language open to much 
censure." 

He also came to the following sensible decision 
which very materially improved his subsequent writ- 
ing:— 

" I will not hereafter vex myself with anxious thoughts 
about my style when composing. It is formed. And if 
there be any ground for the imputation that it is too formal, 
it will only be made worse in this respect by extra solici- 
tude. It is not the defect to which I am predisposed. The 
best security against it is to write with less elaboration — a 
pleasant recipe which conforms to my previous views. This 
determination will save me trouble and time. Hereafter 
what I print shall undergo no ordeal for the style's sake 
except only the grammar." 

Some other remarks of his may be here recorded, 
though they really amount to nothing more than the 
discovery of the old truth, le style c'est Vhomme. 

" A man's style to be worth anything should be the nat- 
ural expression of his mental character. . . . The best 
undoubtedly for every writer is the form of expression best 



vii. J " FERDINAND AND ISABELLA" 129 

suited bo his peculiar burn of thinking, even at some hazard 
oi violating the conventional tone of the most chaste and 
careful writers. It is this alone which can give full force to 
his thoughts. Franklin's style would have borne more orna- 
ment — Washington Irving could have done with less — 
Johnson and Gibbon might have had much less formality, 
and Hume and Goldsmith have occasionally pointed their 
sentences with more effect. But, if they had abandoned the 
natural suggestions of their genius and aimed at the con- 
trary, would they not in mending a hole, as Scott says, have 
very likely made two? . . . Originality — the originality 
of nature — compensates for a thousand minor blemishes. 
. . . The best rule is to dispense with all rules except those 
of grammar, and to consult the natural bent of one's 
genius." 

Thereafter Prescott held to his resolution so far as 
concerned the first draft of what he wrote. He always, 
however, before publication, asked his friends to read 
and criticise what he had written, and he used also to 
employ readers to go over his pages with great minute- 
ness, making notes which he afterwards passed upon, 
rejecting most of the suggestions, but nevertheless 
adopting a good many. 

From the point of view of historical accuracy, Fer- 
dinand and Isabella is a solid piece of work. The 
original sources to which Prescott had access were 
numerous and valuable. Discrepancies and contradic- 
tions he sifted out with patience and truecritical acumen. 
He overlooked nothing, not even those "still-born 
manuscripts " whose writers recorded their experiences 
for the pure pleasure of setting down the truth. Ford 
very justly said, regarding Prescott's notes : " Of the 
accuracy of his quotations and references we cannot 
speak too highly ; they stamp a guarantee on his nar- 
rative ; they enable us to give a reason for our faith ; 



130 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

they furnish means of questioning and correcting the 
author himself ; they enable readers to follow up any 
particular subject suited to their own idiosyncrasy ." 
It is only in that part of the book which relates to the 
Arab domination in Spain that Prescott's work is un- 
satisfactory ; and even there it represents a distinct 
advance upon his predecessors, both French and 
Spanish. At the time when he wrote, it would, indeed, 
have been impossible for him to secure greater accu- 
racy ; because the Arabic manuscripts contained in the 
Escurial had not been opened to the inspection of in- 
vestigators; and, moreover, a knowledge of the lan- 
guage in which they were written would have been 
essential to their proper use. In default of these 
sources, Prescott gave too much credence to Casiri, and 
especially to Conde's history which had appeared not 
long before, but which had been hastily written, so that 
it contained some serious misstatements and inconsist- 
encies. Conde, although he professed to have gone to 
the original records in Arabic, had in reality got most of 
his information at second hand from Cardonne and Mar- 
mol. Hence, Prescott's chapters on the Arabs in Spain, 
although they appear to the general reader to represent 
exact and solid knowledge, are in fact inaccurate in parts. 
In other respects, however, the most modern histor- 
ical scholarship has detected no serious flaws in 
Ferdinand and Isabella. Such defects as the book 
possesses are negative rather than positive, and they 
are really due to the author's cast of mind. Prescott 
was not, and he never became, a philosophical his- 
torian. His gift was for synthesis rather than for 
analysis. He was an industrious gatherer of facts, an 
impartial judge of evidence; a sympathetic and accurate 



mi] " FERDINAND AND ISABELLA" 131 

narrator of events. He could not, however, firmly 
grasp the underlying causes of what he superficially 
observed, nor penetrate the very heart of things. His 
power of generalisation was never strong. There is a 
certain lack also, especially in this first one of his 
historical compositions, of a due appreciation of char- 
acter. He describes the great actors in his drama, — 
Ferdinand, Isabella, Columbus, Ximenes, and Gonsalvo 
de Cordova, — and what he says of them is eminently 
true ; yet, somehow or other, he fails to make them 
live. They are stately figures that move in a 
majestic way across one's field of vision; yet it is 
their outward bearing and their visible acts that he 
makes us know, rather than the interplay of motive 
and temperament which impelled them. His taste, in- 
deed, is decidedly for the splendid and the spectacular. 
Kings, princes, nobles, warriors, and statesmen crowd 
his pages. Perhaps they satisfied the starved imagi- 
nation of the New Englander, whose own life was lived 
amid surroundings antithetically prosaic. Certain it 
is, that, in dwelling upon a memorable epoch, he omitted 
all consideration of a stratum of society which under- 
lay the surface which alone he saw. A few more years, 
and the fifteenth-century picaro, the common man, the 
trader, and the peasant were destined to emerge from 
the humble position to which the usages of chivalry 
had consigned them. The invention of gunpowder and 
the use of it in war soon swept away the advantage 
which the knight in armour had possessed as against 
the humble foot-soldier who followed him. The dis- 
covery of America and the opening of new lands teem- 
ing with treasures for their conquerors roused and 
stimulated the consciousness of the lower orders. Be- 



132 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap, vii 

fore long, the man-at-arms, the musketeer, and the ar- 
tilleryman attained a consequence which the ordinary- 
fighting man had never had before. After these had gone 
forth as adventurers into the New World, they brought 
back with them not only riches wrested from the helpless 
natives whom they had subdued, but a spirit of freedom 
verging even upon lawlessness, which leavened the whole 
stagnant life of Europe. Then, for the first time, such as 
had been only pawns in the game of statesmanship and 
war became factors to be anxiously considered. Even 
literature then takes notice of them, and for the first time 
they begin to influence the course of modern history. A 
philosophical historian, therefore, would have looked be- 
yond the ricos hombres, and would have revealed to us, 
at least in part, the existence and the mode of life of 
that great mass of swarming humanity with which the 
statesman and the feudal lord had soon to reckon. 

As it was, however, Prescott saw the obvious rather 
than the recondite. Within the field which he had 
marked out, his work was admirably done. He deline- 
ated clearly and impartially the events of a splendid 
epoch wherein the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon 
were united under two far-seeing sovereigns, and where- 
in the power of Spanish feudalism was broken, the 
prestige of France and Portugal brought low, the Moors 
expelled, and Spain consolidated into one united king- 
dom from the Pyrenees to the Mediterranean, while a 
new and unknown world was opened for the expansion 
and enrichment of the old. He well deserved the praise 
which a Spanish critic and scholar 1 gave him of having 
written in a masterly manner one of the most successful 
historical productions of the century in which he lived. 

1 Don Pascual de Gayangos. 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE w CONQUEST OF MEXICO " AS LITERATURE 
AND AS HISTORY 

Regarded simply from the standpoint of literary 
criticism, the Conquest of Mexico is Prescott's master- 
piece. More than that, it is one of the most brilliant 
examples which the English language possesses of 
literary art applied to historical narration. Its theme 
is one which contains all the elements of the romantic, — 
the chivalrous daring which boldly attempts the seem- 
ingly impossible, the struggle of the few against over- 
whelming odds, the dauntless heroism which never 
quails in the presence of defeat, desertion, defiance, or 
disaster, the spectacle of the forces of one civilisation 
arrayed against those of another, the white man striv- 
ing for supremacy over the red man, and finally, the 
True Faith in arms against a bloody form of paganism. 
In Prescott's treatment of this theme we find displayed 
the conscious skill of the born artist who subordinates 
everything to the dramatic development of the central 
motive. The style is Prescott's at its best, — not terse 
and pointed like Macaulay's, nor yet so intimately per- 
suasive as that of Parkman, but nevertheless free, 
flowing, and often stately — the fit instrument of ex- 
pression for a sensitive and noble rnind. Finally, in 
this book Prescott shows a power of depicting charac- 
ter that is far beyond his wont, so that his heroes are 

133 



134 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

not lay figures but living men. We need not wonder, 
then, if the Conquest of Mexico has held its own as 
literature, and if to-day it is as widely read and with 
the same breathless interest as in the years when the 
world first felt the fascination of so great a literary 
achievement. 

When we come to analyse the structure of the nar- 
rative, we find that one secret of its effectiveness lies 
in its artistic unity. Prescott had studied very care- 
fully the manner in which Irving had written the 
story of Columbus, and he learned a valuable lesson 
from the defects of his contemporary. In a memoran- 
dum dated March 21, 1841, he set down some very 
shrewd remarks. 

" Have been looking over Irving's Columbus also. A beau- 
tiful composition, but fatiguing as a whole to the reader. 
Why? The fault is partly in the subject, partly in the 
manner of treating it. The discovery of a new world . . . 
is a magnificent theme in itself, full of sublimity and inter- 
est. But it terminates with the discovery; and, unfor- 
tunately, this is made before half of the first volume is 
disposed of. All after that event is made up of little details, 
— the sailing from one petty island to another, all inhabited 
by savages, and having the same general character. Noth- 
ing can be more monotonous, and, of course, more likely to 
involve the writer in barren repetition. . . . Irving should 
have abridged this part of his story, and instead of four 
volumes, have brought it into two. . . . The conquest of 
Mexico, though very inferior in the leading idea which forms 
its basis to the story of Columbus, is, on the whole, a far 
better subject ; since the event is sufficiently grand, and, as 
the catastrophe is deferred, the interest is kept up through 
the whole. Indeed, the perilous adventures and crosses with 
which the enterprise was attended, the desperate chances 
and reverses and unexpected vicissitudes, all serve to keep 
the interest alive. On my plan, I go on with Cortes to his 



viii.] -CONQUEST OF MEXICO" 135 

death. But I must take care not to make this tail-piece too 
long." 

This is a bit of very accurate criticism; and the 
plan which Prescott formed was executed in a manner 
absolutely faultless. Never for a moment is there a 
break in the continuity of its narrative. Never for a 
moment do we lose sight of the central and inspiring 
figure of Cortes fighting his way, as it were, single- 
handed against the intrigues of his own countrymen, 
the half-heartedness of his followers, the obstacles of 
nature, and the overwhelming forces of his Indian 
foes, to a superb and almost incredible success. Every- 
thing in the narrative is subordinated to this. Every 
event is made to bear directly upon the development 
of this leading motive. The art of Prescott in this 
book is the art of a great dramatist who keeps his eye 
and brain intent upon the true catastrophe, in the light 
of which alone the other episodes possess significance. 
To the general reader this supreme moment comes 
when Corte's makes his second entry into Mexico, 
returning over " the black and blasted environs," to 
avenge the horrors of the noche triste, and in one last 
tremendous assault upon the capital to destroy forever 
the power of the Aztecs and bring Guatemozin into 
the possession of his conqueror. What follows after is 
almost superfluous to one who reads the story for the 
pure enjoyment which it gives. It is like the last 
chapter of some novels, appended to satisfy the curios- 
ity of those who wish to know " what happened after." 
In nothing has Prescott shown his literary tact more 
admirably than in compressing this record of the 
aftermath of Conquest within the limit of some hun- 
dred pages. 



136 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

The superiority of the Conquest of Mexico to all the 
rest of Prescott's works is sufficiently proved by one 
unquestioned fact. Though we read his other books 
with pleasure and unflagging interest, the Conquest of 
Mexico alone stamps upon our minds the memory of 
certain episodes which are told so vividly as never to 
be obliterated. We may never open the book again ; 
yet certain pages remain part and parcel of our intel- 
lectual possessions. In them Prescott has risen to a 
height of true greatness as a story-teller and master- 
ful word-painter. Of these, for example, is the account 
of the burning of the ships, 1 when Cortes, by destroy- 
ing his fleet, cuts off from his wavering troops all 
hope of a return home except as conquerors, and when, 
facing them, in imminent peril of death at their hands, 
his manly eloquence so kindles their imagination and 
stirs their fighting blood as to make them shout, " To 
Mexico ! To Mexico ! " Another striking passage is 
that which tells of what happened in Cholula, where 
the little army of Spaniards, after being received with 
a show of cordial hospitality, learn that the treacherous 
Aztecs have laid a plot for their extermination. 2 

" That night was one of deep anxiety to the army. The 
ground they stood on seemed loosening beneath their feet, 
and any moment might be the one marked for their destruc- 
tion. Their vigilant general took all possible precautions 
for their safety, increasing the number of sentinels, and 
posting his guns in such a manner as to protect the approaches 
to the camp. His eyes, it may well be believed, did not 
close during the night. Indeed, every Spaniard lay down in 
his arms, and every horse stood saddled and bridled, ready 

i i. pp. 364-369. Ed. by Kirk (Philadelphia, 1873). 
2 For a revision of Prescott's narrative here in its light of later 
research, see Bandelier, Tlie Gilded Man, pp. 258-281 (New York, 



vim.] ' 01 MEXICO" 137 

for instant service. But no assault was meditated by the 
Indians, and the stillness of the hour was undisturbed except 
by the occasional sounds heard in a populous city, even when 
1 in slumber, and by the hoarse cries of the priests 
from the turrets of the teocallis, proclaiming through their 
trumpets the watches of the night." 1 

Here is true literary art used to excite in the 
reader the same fearfulness and apprehension which 
the Spaniards themselves experienced. The last sen- 
tence has a peculiar and indescribable effect upon the 
nerves, so that in the following chapter we feel some- 
thing of the exultation of the Castilian soldier when 
morning breaks, and Cortes receives the Cholulan 
chiefs, astounds them by revealing that he knows their 
plot, and then, before they can recover from their 
thunderstruck amazement, orders a general attack upon 
the Indians who have stealthily gathered to destroy 
the w r hite men. The battle-scene which follows and 
of which a part is quoted here, is unsurpassed by any 
other to be found in modern history. 

" Cortes had placed his battery of heavy guns in a position 
that commanded the avenues, and swept off the files of the 
assailants as they rushed on. In the intervals between the dis- 
charges, which, in the imperfect state of the science in that 
day, were much longer than in ours, he forced back the press 
by charging with the horse into the midst. The steeds, the 
guns, the weapons of the Spaniards, were all new to the 
Cholulans. Notwithstanding the novelty of the terrific 
spectacle, the flash of fire-arms mingling with the deafening 
roar of the artillery as its thunders reverberated among the 
buildings, the despairing Indians pushed on to take the 
places of their fallen comrades. 

•• While this fierce struggle was going forward, the Tlas- 
calans, hearing the concerted signal, had advanced with 
quick pace into the city. They had bound, by order of 

i ii. p. 20. 



138 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

Cortes, wreaths of sedge round their heads, that they might 
the more surely be distinguished from the Cholulans. Com- 
ing up in the very heat of the engagement, they fell on the 
defenceless rear of the townsmen, who, trampled down under 
the heels of the Castilian cavalry on one side, and galled by 
their vindictive enemies on the other, could no longer main- 
tain their ground. They gave way, some taking refuge in 
the nearest buildings, which, being partly of wood, were 
speedily set on fire. Others fled to the temples. One strong 
party, with a number of priests at its head, got possession 
of the great teocalli. There was a vulgar tradition, already 
alluded to, that on removal of part of the walls the god 
would send forth an inundation to overwhelm his enemies. 
The superstitious Cholulans with great difficulty succeeded 
in wrenching away some of the stones in the walls of the 
edifice. But dust, not water, followed. Their false god 
deserted them in the hour of need. In despair they flung 
themselves into the wooden turrets that crowned the temple, 
and poured down stones, javelins, and burning arrows on the 
Spaniards, as they climbed the great staircase which, by a 
flight of one hundred and twenty steps, scaled the face of the 
pyramid. But the fiery shower fell harmless on the steel 
bonnets of the Christians, while they availed themselves of 
the burning shafts to set fire to the wooden citadel, which 
was speedily wrapt in flames. Still the garrison held out, 
and though quarter, it is said, was offered, only one Cholulan 
availed himself of it. The rest threw themselves headlong 
from the parapet, or perished miserably in the flames. 

" All was now confusion and uproar in the fair city which 
had so lately reposed in security and peace. The groans 
of the dying, the frantic supplications of the vanquished 
for mercy, were mingled with the loud battle-cries of 
the Spaniards as they rode down their enemy, and with the 
shrill whistle of the Tlascalans, who gave full scope to the 
long-cherished rancour of ancient rivalry. The tumult was 
still further swelled by the incessant rattle of musketry and 
the crash of falling timbers, which sent up a volume of flame 
that outshone the ruddy light of morning, making altogether 
a hideous confusion of sights and sounds that converted the 
Holy City into a Pandemonium." 



vii ; J "CONQUEST OF MEXICO" 139 

Tins spirited description, which deserves compari- 
son with Livy's picture of the rout at Cannae, shows 
icott a1 his best. In it he has shaken off every 
6 of formalism and of leisurely repose. His blood 
18 up. The short, nervous sentences, the hurry of the 
narrative, the rapid onrush of events, rouse the reader 
and fill him with the true battle-spirit. Of an en- 
tirely different genre is the account of the entrance 
of the Spanish army into Mexico as Montezuma's 
guest, and of the splendid city which they beheld, — 
the broad streets coated with a hard cement, the inter- 
secting canals, the inner lake darkened by thousands 
of canoes, the great market-places, the long vista of 
snowy mansions, their inner porticoes embellished with 
porphyry and jasper, and the fountains of crystal 
water leaping up and glittering in the sunlight. Mem- 
orable, too, is the scene of the humiliation of Monte- 
zuma when, having come as a friend to the quarters of 
the Spaniards, he is fettered like a slave ; and that other 
scene, no less painful, where the fallen monarch ap- 
pears upon the walls and begs his people to desist from 
violence, only to be greeted with taunts and insults, 
and a shower of stones. 

But most impressive of all and most unforgettable 
is the story of the noche triste — the Spanish army and 
their Indian allies stealing silently and at dead of 
night out of the city which but a short time before 
they had entered with so brave a show. 

" The night was cloudy, and a drizzling rain, which fell 
without intermission, added to the obscurity. The great 
square before the palace was deserted, as, indeed, it had been 
since the fall of Montezuma. Steadily, and as noiselessly as 
possible, the Spaniards held their way along the great street 



140 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

of Tlacopan, which so lately had resounded with the tumult 
of battle. All was now hushed in silence ; and they were 
only reminded of the past by the occasional presence of some 
solitary corpse, or a dark heap of the slain, which too plainly 
told where the strife had been hottest. As they passed along 
the lanes and alleys which opened into the great street, or 
looked down the canals, whose polished surface gleamed with 
a sort of ebon lustre through the obscurity of night, they 
easily fancied that they discerned the shadowy forms of their 
foe lurking in ambush and ready to spring on them. But 
it was only fancy ; and the city slept undisturbed even by 
the prolonged echoes of the tramp of the horses and the 
hoarse rumbling of the artillery and baggage-trains. At 
length, a lighter space beyond the dusky line of buildings 
showed the van of the army that it was emerging on the 
open causeway. They might well have congratulated them- 
selves on having thus escaped the dangers of an assault in 
the city itself, and that a brief time would place them in 
comparative safety on the opposite shore. But the Mexicans 
were not all asleep. 

"As the Spaniards drew near the spot where the street 
opened on the causeway, and were preparing to lay the port- 
able bridge across the uncovered breach, which now met 
their eyes, several Indian sentinels, who had been stationed 
at this, as at the other approaches to the city, took the alarm, 
and fled, rousing their countrymen by their cries. The priests, 
keeping their night-watch on the summit of the teocallis, in- 
stantly caught the tidings and sounded their shells, while 
the huge drum in the desolate temple of the war-god sent 
forth those solemn tones, which, heard only in seasons of 
calamity, vibrated through every corner of the capital. The 
Spaniards saw that no time was to be lost. . . . Before they 
had time to defile across the narrow passage, a gathering 
sound was heard, like that of a mighty forest agitated by 
the winds. It grew louder and louder, while on the dark 
waters of the lake was heard a plashing noise, as of many 
oars. Then came a few stones and arrows striking at random 
among the hurrying troops. They fell every moment faster 
and more furious, till they thickened into a terrible tempest, 
while the very heavens were rent with the yells and war- 



viii.] "CONQUEST OF MEXICO" 141 

cries of myriads of combatants, who seemed all at once to 
be swarming over land and lake ! " 

What reader of this passage can forget the ominous, 
melancholy note of that great war drum ? It is one of 
the most haunting things in all literature — like the 
blood-stained hands of the guilty queen in Macbeth, 
or the footprint on the sand in Robinson Crusoe, or 
the chill, mirthless laughter of the madwoman in 
Jane Eyre. 

One other splendidly vital passage is that which 
recounts the last great agony on the retreat from 
Mexico. The shattered remnants of the army of 
Cortes are toiling slowly onward to the coast, faint 
with famine and fatigue, deprived of the arms which 
in their flight they had thrown away, and harassed 
by their dusky enemies, who hover about them, call- 
ing out in tones of menace, " Hasten on ! You will 
soon find yourselves where you cannot escape ! " 

" As the army was climbing the mountain steeps which 
shut in the Valley of Otompan, the vedettes came in with 
the intelligence that a powerful body was encamped on the 
other side, apparently awaiting their approach. The intel- 
ligence was soon confirmed by their own eyes, as they turned 
the crest of the sierra, and saw spread out, below, a mighty 
host, filling up the whole depth of the valley, and giving to 
it the appearance, from the white cotton mail of the warriors, 
of being covered with snow. ... As far as the eye could 
reach, were to be seen shields and waving banners, fantastic 
helmets, forests of shining spears, the bright feather-mail of 
the chief, and the coarse cotton panoply of his follower, all 
mingled together in wild confusion and tossing to and fro 
like the billows of a troubled ocean. It was a sight to fill 
the stoutest heart among the Christians with dismay, height- 
ened by the previous expectation of soon reaching the friendly 
land which was to terminate their wearisome pilgrimage. 



142 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

Even Cortes, as he contrasted the tremendous array before 
him with his own diminished squadrons, wasted by disease 
and enfeebled by hunger and fatigue, could not escape the 
conviction that his last hour had arrived. ,, x 

But it is not merely in vivid narration and descrip- 
tion of events that the Conquest of Mexico attains so 
rare a degree of excellence. Here, as nowhere else, 
has Prescott succeeded in delineating character. All 
the chief actors of his great historic drama not only 
live and breathe, but they are as distinctly differen- 
tiated as they must have been in life. Cortes and his 
lieutenants are persons whom we actually come to 
know in the pages of Prescott, just as in the pages 
of Xenophon we come to know Clearchus and the 
adventurous generals who, like Cortes, made their 
way into the heart of a great empire and faced bar- 
barians in battle. The comparison between Xenophon 
and Prescott is, indeed, a very natural one, and it was 
made quite early after the appearance of the Ferdi- 
nand and Isabella by an English admirer, Mr. Thomas 
Grenville. Calling upon this gentleman one day, Mr. 
Everett found him in his library reading Xenophon' s 
Anabasis in the original Greek. Mr. Everett made 
some casual remark upon the merits of that book, 
whereupon Mr. Grenville holding up a volume of 
Ferdinand and Isabella said, "Here is one far 
superior." 2 

Xenophon's character-drawing was done in his own 
way, briefly and in dry-point ; yet Clearchus, Proxenus, 
and Menon are not more subtly distinguished from each 

1 ii. pp. 379-380. 

2 Everett, Memorial Address, delivered before the Massachusetts 
Historical Society (1859) . 



viii.] "CONQUEST OF MEXICO" 148 

other than are Cortes, Sandoval, and Alvarado. Corte's 
rv real, — a bold, martial figure, the ideal man of 
gallant in bearing and powerful of physique, 
tireless, confident, and exerting a magnetic influence 
over all who come into his presence ; gifted also 
with a truly Spanish craft, and not without a touch 
of Spanish cruelty. Sandoval is the true knight, — 
loyal, devoted to his chief, wise, and worthy of all 
trust. Alvarado is the reckless man-at-arms, — daring 
to desperation, hot-tempered, fickle, and passionate, 
yet with all his faults a man to extort one's liking, 
even as he compelled the Aztecs to admire him for 
his intrepidity and frankness. Over against these 
three brilliant figures stands the melancholy form of 
Montezuma, around whom, even from the first, one 
feels gathering the darkness of his coming fate. He 
reminds one of some hero of Greek tragedy, doomed 
to destruction and intensely conscious of it, yet striv- 
ing in vain against the decree of an inexorable destiny. 
One recalls him as he is described when the head of 
a Spanish soldier had been cut off and sent to him. 

" It was uncommonly large and covered with hair ; and, as 
Montezuma gazed on the ferocious features, rendered more 
horrible by death, he seemed to read in them the dark linea- 
ments of the destined destroyers of his house. He turned 
from it with a shudder, and commanded that it should be 
taken from the city, and not offered at the shrine of any 
of his gods." 1 

The contrast between this dreamy, superstitious, 
half-hearted, and almost womanish prince and his 
successor Guatemozin is splendidly worked out. 
Guatemozin's fierce patriotism, his hatred of the 

1 ii. p. 157. 



144 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

Spaniards, his ferocity in battle, and his stubborn 
unwillingness to yield are displayed with consum- 
mate art, yet in such a way as to win one's sympa- 
thy for him without estranging it from those who 
conquered him. A touch of sentiment is delicately 
infused into the whole narrative of the Conquest by 
the manner in which Prescott has treated the rela- 
tions of Cortes and the Indian girl, Marina. Here 
we find interesting evidence of Prescott ? s innate 
purity cf mind and thought, for he undoubtedly 
idealised this girl and suppressed, or at any rate 
passed over very lightly, the truth which Bernal 
Diaz, on the other hand, sets forth with the blunt 
coarseness of a foul-mouthed old soldier. 1 No one 
would gather from Prescott's pages that Marina had 
been the mistress of other men before Cortes. Nor 
do we get any hint from him that Cortes wearied of 
her in the end, and thrust her off upon one of his cap- 
tains whom he made drunk in order to render him will- 
ing to go through the forms of marriage with her. In 
Prescott's narrative she is lovely, graceful, generous, 
and true ; and the only hint that is given of her former 
life is found in the statement that "she had her 
errors." 2 To his readers she is, after a fashion, the 
heroine of the Conquest, — the tender, affectionate com- 
panion of the Conqueror, sharing his dangers or avert- 
ing them, and not seldom mitigating by her influence 
the sternness of his character. Another instance of 
Prescott's delicacy of mind is found in the way in 
which he glides swiftly over the whole topic of the 
position which women occupied among the Aztecs, 
although his Spanish sources were brutally explicit on 
1 Mujer entremetida y desembuelta (Diaz). 2 i. p. 294. 



vim.] 0NQUK8T OF MEXICO M 146 

this point. There were some things, therefore, from 
which Prescott shrank instinctively and in which he 
allowed his sensitive modesty to soften and refine upon 
the truth. 

The mention of this circumstance leads one to con- 
sider the much-mooted question as to how far the Con- 
o may be accepted as veracious history. 
Is it history at all or is it, as some have said, histori- 
cal romance ? Are we to classify it with such books as 
those of Ranke and Parkman, whose brilliancy of style 
is wholly compatible with scrupulous fidelity to historic 
fact, or must we think of it as verging upon the category 
of romances built up around the material which history 
affords — with books like Ivanhoe and Harold and So- 
la in mho t In the years immediately following its publica- 
tion, Prescott's great work was accepted as indubitably 
accurate. His imposing array of foot-notes, his thorough 
acquaintance with the Spanish chronicles, and the un- 
stinted approval given to him by contemporary historians 
inspired in the public an implicit faith. Then, here and 
there, a sceptic began to raise his head, and to question, 
not the good faith of Prescott, but rather the value of 
the very sources upon which Prescott' s history had been 
built. As a matter of fact, long before Prescott's time, 
the reports and narratives of the conquerors had in parts 
been doubted. As early as the eighteenth century 
Lafitau, the Jesuit missionary, in a treatise published 
in 1723, 1 had discussed with great acuteness some ques- 
tions of American ethnology in a spirit of scientific criti- 

1 Heron des Saucages Ame'ricains Compares aux Mu<urs des 
Premiers Temps (Paris, 1723). Lafitau had lived as a missionary 
among the Iroquois for five years, after which he returned to France 
and spent the rest of his life in teaching and writing. 

L 



146 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

cism ; and later in the same century, James Adair had 
gathered valuable material in the same department of 
knowledge. 1 Even earlier, the Spanish Jesuit, Jose de 
Acosta, had published a treatise which exhibits traces 
of a critical method. 2 Again, Robertson, in his History 
of America (a book, by the way, which Prescott had 
studied very carefully), shows an independence of atti- 
tude and an acumen which find expression in a definite 
disagreement with much that had been set down by 
the Spanish chroniclers. Such criticism as these and 
other isolated writers had brought to bear was directed 
against that part of the accepted tradition which re- 
lates to the Aztec civilisation. Prescott, following the 
notices of Las Casas, Herrera, Bernal Diaz, Oviedo, 
Cortes himself, and the writer who is known as the 
conquistador anonimo, had simply weighed the asser- 
tions of one as against those of another, striving to 
reconcile their discrepancies of statement and follow- 
ing one rather than the other, according to the appar- 
ent preponderance of probability. He did not, however, 
perceive in these discrepancies the clue which might 
have guided him, as it subsequently did others, to a 
clearer understanding of the actual facts. Therefore, 
he has painted for us the Mexico of Montezuma in 
gorgeous colours, seeing in it a great Empire, possessed 
of a civilisation no less splendid than that of Western 
Europe, and exhibiting a political and social system 
comparable with that which Europeans knew. The 
magnificence and wealth of this fancied Empire gave, 
indeed, the necessary background to his story of the 
Conquest. It was a stage setting which raised the 

1 The History of the American Indians (London, 1775). 

2 Eistoria Natural y Moral de las Indias (Seville, 1590). 



vni] "CONQUEST OF MEXICO » 147 

exploits of the conquerors to a lofty and almost epic 
altitude. 

The first serious attempt directly to discredit the 
accuracy of this description was made by an American 
writer, Mr. Eobert A. Wilson. Wilson was an enthu- 
siastic amateur who took a particular interest in the 
ethnology of the American Indians. He had travelled 
in Mexico. He knew something of the Indians of our 
Western territory, and he had read the Spanish chroni- 
clers. The result of his observations was a thorough 
disbelief in the traditional picture of Aztec civilisa- 
tion. He, therefore, set out to demolish it and to 
offer in its place a substitute based upon such facts 
as he had gathered and such theories as he had 
formed. After publishing a preliminary treatise which 
attracted some attention, he wrote a bulky volume en- 
titled A New History of the Conquest of Mexico. 1 In 
the introduction to this book he declares that his visit 
to Mexico had shaken his belief " in those Spanish his- 
toric romances upon which Mr. Prescott has founded 
his magnificent tale of the conquest of Mexico." He 
adds that the despatches of Cortes are the only valu- 
able written authority, and that these consist of two 
distinct parts, — first, "an accurate detail of adven- 
tures consistent throughout with the topography of 
the region in which they occurred " ; and second, " a 
mass of foreign material, apparently borrowed from 
fables of the Moorish era, for effect in Spain." " It 
was not in great battles, but in a rapid succession of 
skirmishes, that he distinguished himself and won the 
character ... of an adroit leader in Indian war." 
Wilson endeavours to show, in the first place, that the 
i Philadelphia, 1859. 



148 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

Aztecs were simply a branch of the American Indian 
race ; that their manners and customs were essentially 
those of the more northern tribes ; that the origin of 
the whole race was Phoenician ; and that the Spanish 
account of early Mexico is almost wholly fabulous. 
Writing of the different historians of the Conquest, he 
mentions Prescott in the following words : — 

" A more delicate duty remains, — to speak freely of an 
American whose success in the field of literature has raised 
him to the highest rank. His talents have not only im- 
mortalised himself — they have added a new charm to the 
subject of his histories. He showed his faith by the expen- 
diture of a fortune at the commencement of his enterprise, 
in the purchase of books and Mss. relating to ( America of 
the Spaniards/ These were the materials out of which he 
framed his two histories of the two aboriginal empires, 
Mexico and Peru. At the time these works were written he 
could not have had the remotest idea of the circumstances 
under which his Spanish authorities had been produced, or of 
the external pressure that gave them their peculiar form and 
character. He could hardly understand that peculiar organi- 
sation of Spanish society through which one set of opinions 
might be uniformly expressed in public, while the intellect- 
ual classes in secret entertain entirely opposite ones. He 
acted throughout in the most perfect good faith ; and if, on 
a subsequent scrutiny, his authorities have proved to be the 
fabulous creations of Spanish-Arabian fancy, he is not in 
fault. They were the standards when he made use of them 
— a sufficient justification of his acts. ' This beautiful world 
we inhabit,' said an East Indian philosopher, < rests on the 
back of a mighty elephant ; the elephant stands on the back of 
a monster turtle ; the turtle rests upon a serpent ; and the ser- 
pent on nothing/ Thus stand the literary monuments Mr. 
Prescott has constructed. They are castles resting upon a cloud 
which reflects an eastern sunrise upon a western horizon/' 

This book appeared in the year of Prescott' s death, 
and he himself made no published comment on it. A 



viii.] "CONQUEST OF MEXICO 1 ' 149 

very sharp notice, however, was written by some one 
who did not sign his name, but who was undoubtedly 
very near to Prescott. 1 The writer of this notice had 
little difficulty in showing that Wilson was a very 
slipshod investigator ; that he was in many respects 
ignorant of the very authorities whom he attempted 
to refute; and that as a writer he was very crude 
indeed. Some portions of this paper may be quoted, 
mainly because they sum up such of Mr. Wilson's 
points as were in reality important. The first para- 
graph has also a somewhat personal interest. 

11 Directly and knowingly, as we shall hereafter show, he has 
availed himself of Mr. Prescott's labours to an extent which 
demanded the most ample * acknowledgment/ No such 
acknowledgment is made. But we beg to ask Mr. Wilson 
whether there were not other reasons why he should have 
spoken of this eminent writer, if not with deference, at least 
with respect. He himself informs us that ' most kindly re- 
lations ' existed between them. If we are not misinformed, 
Mr. Wilson opened the correspondence by modestly request- 
ing the loan of Mr. Prescott's collection of works relating to 
Mexican history, for the purpose of enabling him to write 
a refutation of the latter's History of the Conquest. That 
the replies which he received were courteous and kindly, we 
need hardly say. He was informed, that, although the con- 
stant use made of the collection by its possessor for the cor- 
rection of his own work must prevent a full compliance 
with this request, yet any particular books which he might 
designate should be sent to him, and, if he were disposed 
to make a visit to Boston, the fullest opportunities should 
be granted him for the prosecution of his researches. This 
invitation Mr. Wilson did not think fit to accept. Books 
which were got in readiness for transmission to him he failed 
to send for. He had, in the meantime, discovered that ' the 
American standpoint ' did not require any examination of 

i Atlantic Monthly, iii, pp. 518-625 and pp. 633-645. 



150 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

1 authorities.' We regret that it should also have rendered 
superfluous an acquaintance with the customs of civilised 
society. The tone in which he speaks of his distinguished 
predecessor is sometimes amusing from the conceit which 
it displays, sometimes disgusting from its impudence and 
coarseness. He concedes Mr. Prescott's good faith in the 
use of his materials. It was only his ignorance and want of 
the proper qualifications that prevented him from using them 
aright. 'His n on- acquaintance with Indian character is 
much to be regretted/ Mr. Wilson himself enjoys, as he tells 
us, the inestimable advantage of being the son of an adopted 
member of the Iroquois tribe. Nay, * his ancestors, for sev- 
eral generations, dwelt near the Indian agency at Cherry 
Valley, on Wilson's Patent, though in Cooperstown village 
was he born.' We perceive the author's fondness for the in- 
verted style in composition, — acquired, perhaps, in the course 
of his long study of aboriginal oratory. Even without such 
proofs, and without his own assertion of the fact, it would 
not have been difficult, we think, to conjecture his familiar- 
ity with the forms of speech common among barbarous 
nations. . . . 

"Mr. Wilson ... has found, from his own observation, — 
the only source of knowledge, if such it can be called, on which 
he is willing to place much reliance, — that the Ojibways 
and Iroquois are savages, and he rightly argues that their 
ancestors must have been savages. From these premises, 
without any process of reasoning, he leaps at once to the 
conclusion, that in no part of America could the aboriginal 
inhabitants ever have lived in any other than a savage state. 
Hence he tells us, that, in all statements regarding them, 
everything < must be rejected that is inconsistent with well- 
established Indian traits.' The ancient Mexican empire was, 
according to his showing, nothing more than one of those 
confederacies of tribes with which the reader of early New 
England history is perfectly familiar. The far-famed city of 
Mexico was c an Indian village of the first class,' — such, we 
may hope, as that which the author saw on his visit to the 
Massasaugus, where, to his immense astonishment, he found 
the people < clothed, and in their right minds.' The Aztecs, 
he argues, could not have built temples, for the Iroquois do 



Tin.] " CONQUEST OF MEXICO" 151 

not build temples. The Aztecs could not have been idolaters 
or offered up human sacrifices, for the Iroquois are not idola- 
ters and do not offer up human sacrifices. The Aztecs could 
not have been addicted to cannibalism, for the Iroquois never 
eat human flesh, unless driven to it by hunger. This is 
what Mr. Wilson means by the ' American standpoint ' ; and 
those who adopt his views may consider the whole question 
settled without any debate. ,, . . . 

" If, at Mr. Wilson's summons, we reject as improbable a 
series of events supported by far stronger evidence than can 
be adduced for the conquests of Alexander, the Crusades, or 
the Norman conquest of England, w T hat is it, we may ask, 
that he calls upon us to believe ? His scepticism, as so often 
happens, affords the measure of his credulity. He con- 
tends that Cortes, the greatest Spaniard of the sixteenth 
century, a man little acquainted with books, but endowed 
with a gigantic genius and with all the qualities requisite 
for success in warlike enterprises and an adventurous 
career, had his brain so filled with the romances of chivalry, 
and so preoccupied with reminiscences of the Spanish con- 
tests with the Moslems, that he saw in the New World 
nothing but duplicates of those contests, — that his heated 
imagination turned wigwams into palaces, Indian villages 
into cities like Granada, swamps into lakes, a tribe of sav- 
ages into an empire of civilised men, — that, in the midst of 
embarrassments and dangers which, even on Mr. Wilson's 
showing, must have taxed all his faculties to the utmost, he 
employed himself chiefly in coining lies with which to de- 
ceive his imperial master and all the inhabitants of Christen- 
dom, — that, although he had a host of powerful enemies 
among his countrymen, enemies who were in a position to 
discover the truth, his statements passed unchallenged and 
uncontradicted by them, — that the numerous adventurers and 
explorers who followed in his track, instead of exposing the 
falsity of his relations and descriptions, found their interest 
in embellishing the narrative." 

Of course Wilson's book was unscientific to a degree, 
with its Phoenician theories, its estimate of Spanish 
sources of information, and its assorted ignorance of 



152 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

many things. Its author, had, however, stumbled 
upon a bit of truth which no ridicule could shake, and 
which proved fruitful in suggestion to a very different 
kind of investigator. This was Mr. Lewis Henry 
Morgan, an important name in the history of American 
ethnological study. As a young man Morgan had felt 
an interest in the American Indian, which developed 
into a very unusual enthusiasm. It led him ultimately 
to spend a long time among the Iroquois, studying their 
tribal organisation and social phenomena. He em- 
bodied the knowledge so obtained in a book entitled 
The League of the Iroquois, 1 a truly epoch-making work, 
though the author himself was at the time wholly 
unaware of its far-reaching importance. This book 
described the forms of government, the social organisa- 
tion, the manners and the customs of the Iroquois, 
with great accuracy and thoroughness. Seven years 
later, Morgan happened to fall in with a camp of Ojib- 
way Indians, and found to his astonishment that their 
tribal customs were practically identical with those of 
the Iroquois. While this coincidence was fresh in his 
mind, Morgan read Wilson's iconoclastic book on Mex- 
ico. The suggestion made by Wilson that the Aztec 
civilisation was essentially the same as that of the 
northern tribes of Eed Indians did much to crystallise 
the hypothesis which has now been definitely estab- 
lished as a fact. 

Those who do not care to read a long series of 
monographs and several large volumes in order to 
arrive at a knowledge of what recent ethnologists 
hold as true of Ancient Mexico may find the essence 
of accepted doctrine somewhat divertingly set forth 

i New York, 1851. 



viii.] "CONQUEST OF MEXICO »• 153 

in a paper written by Mr. Morgan in criticism of H. 
H. Bancroft's Native Races of the Pacific States. Mr. 
Morgan's paper is entitled "Montezuma's Dinner." 1 
In it the statement is briefly made that the Aztecs 
were simply one branch of the same Red Eace which 
extended all over the American Continent ; that their 
forms of government, their usages, and their occu- 
pations were not in kind different from those of 
the Iroquois, the Ojibways, or any other of the North 
American Indian tribes. These institutions and cus- 
toms found no analogues among civilised nations, and 
could not, in their day, be explained in terms intel- 
ligible to contemporary Europeans. Hence, when 
the Spaniards under Cortes discovered in Mexico a 
definite and fully developed form of civilisation, 
instead of studying it on the assumption that it 
might be different from their own, they described it, 
as Mr. A. F. Bandelier has well said, " in terms of 
comparison selected from types accessible to the lim- 
ited knowledge of the times." 2 Thus, they beheld in 
Montezuma an " emperor" surrounded by " kings," 
" princes," " nobles," and " generals." His residence 
was to them an imperial palace. His mode of life 
showed the magnificent and stately etiquette of a 
European monarch, with lords-in-waiting, court jesters, 
pages, secretaries, and household guards. In narrat- 
ing all these things, the first Spanish observers were 
wholly honest, although in their enthusiasm they 
added many a touch of literary colour. Their records 

1 North American Review, cxxii, pp. 265-308 (1876). 

2 The Romantic School of American Archeology \ A paper read 
before the New York Historical Society, February 3, 1885 (New 
York, 1885). 



154 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

are paralleled by those of the English explorers who, 
in New England, thought they had found "kings" 
among the Pequods and Narragansetts, and who, in 
Virginia, viewed Powhatan as an " emperor" and 
Pocahontas as a "princess." That the Spaniards, 
like the English, wrote in ignorant good faith, rather 
than with a desire to deceive, is shown by the fact 
that they actually did record circumstances which 
even then, if critically studied, would have shown 
the falsity of their general belief. Thus, as Mr. 
Bandelier points out, the Spaniards tell of the Aztecs 
that they had great wealth, reared great palaces, 
and acquired both scientific knowledge and skill in 
art, while in mechanical appliances they remained 
on the level of the savage, using stone and flint 
for tools and weapons, making pottery without the 
potter's wheel, and weaving intricate patterns with 
the hand-loom only. Equally inconsistent are the 
statements that the Aztecs were mild, gentle, vir- 
tuous, and kind, and yet that they sacrificed their 
prisoners with the most savage rites, made war that 
they might secure more sacrificial victims, viewed 
marriage as a barter, and regarded chastity as a re- 
straint. 1 Still further inconsistencies are to be found 
in the Spanish accounts of the Aztec government. 
Montezuma, for instance, is picturesquely held to have 
been an absolute ruler, one whose very name aroused 
awe and veneration throughout the whole extent of his 
vast dominions ; and yet it is recorded that while still 
alive he was superseded by Guatemozin; and even 
Acosta notes that there was a council without whose 
consent nothing of importance could be done. In fact, 
1 Bandelier, op. cit., p. 8. 



viii.] "CONQUEST OF MEXICO" 155 

under the solvent of Mr. Morgan's criticism, the gor- 
geous Aztec empire of Cortes and Prescott shrinks to 
very modest proportions. Montezuma is transformed 
from an hereditary monarch into an elective war-chief. 
His dominions become a territory of about the size 
of the state of Rhode Island. His capital appears as 
a stronghold built amid marshes and surrounded by 
flat-roofed houses of adobe ; while his " palace " is a 
huge communal-house, built of stone and lime, and in- 
habited by his gentile kindred, united in one house- 
hold. The magnificent feast which the Spaniards 
describe so lusciously, — the throned king served by 
beautiful women and by stewards who knelt before 
him without daring to lift their eyes, the dishes of 
gold and silver, the red and black Cholulan jars filled 
with foaming chocolate, the " ancient lords n attending 
at a distance, the orchestra of flutes, reeds, horns, and 
kettle-drums, and the three thousand guards without 
— all this is converted by Morgan into a sort of bar- 
baric buffet-luncheon, with Montezuma squatting on the 
floor, surrounded by his relatives in breech-clouts, and 
eating a meal prepared in a common cook-house, divided 
at a common kettle, and eaten out of an earthen bowl. 
One need not, however, lend himself to so complete 
a disillusionment as Mr. Morgan in this paper seeks 
to thrust upon us. Still more recent investigations, 
such as those of Brinton, McGee, and Bandelier, have 
restored some of the prestige which Cortes and his 
followers attached to the early Mexicans. While the 
Aztecs were very far from possessing a monarchical 
form of government, and while their society was con- 
stituted far differently from that of any European 
community, and while they are to be studied simply 



156 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

as one division of the Red Indian race, they were 
scarcely so primitive as Mr. Morgan would have us 
think. They differed from their more northern kin- 
dred not, to be sure, in kind, but very greatly in 
degree. Though we have to substitute the communal- 
house for the palace, the war-chief for the king, 
and the tribal organisation for the feudal system, 
there still remains a great and interesting people, 
fully organised, rich, warlike, and highly skilled in 
their own arts. In architecture, weaving, gold and sil- 
ver work, and pottery, they achieved artistic wonders. 
Their instinct for the decorative produced results which 
justified the admiration of their conquerors. Their 
capital, though it was not the immense city which 
the Spaniards saw, teeming with a vast population, 
was, nevertheless, an imposing collection of mansions, 
great and small, whose snowy whiteness, standing 
out against the greenery and diversified by glimpses 
of water, might well impress the imagination of Euro- 
pean strangers. If the communal-houses lacked the 
" golden cupolas " of Disraeli's Oriental fancy, neither 
were they the " mud huts n which Wilson tells of. If 
Montezuma was not precisely an occidental Charles the 
Fifth, neither is he to be regarded as an earlier Sitting 
Bull. 

So far, then, as we have to modify Prescott's chapters 
which describe the Mexico of Cortes, this modification 
consists largely in a mere change of terminology. 
Following the Spanish records, he has accurately re- 
produced just what the Spaniards saw, or thought they 
saw, in old Tenochtitlan. He has looked at all things 
through their eyes ; and such errors as he made were 
the same errors which they had made while they were 



tiii] "CONQUEST OF MEXICO" 157 

standing in the great pueblo which was to them the 
scene of so much suffering and of so great a final 
triumph. When Prescott wrote, there lived no man 
who could have gainsaid him. His story represents 
the most accurate information which was then attain- 
able. As Mr. Thorpe has well expressed it : " No 
historian is responsible for not using undiscovered 
evidence. Prescott wrote from the archives of Europe 
. . . from the European side. If one cares to know 
how the Old World first understood the New, he will 
read Prescott." Even Morgan, who goes further in 
his destructive criticism than any other authoritative 
writer, admits that Prescott and his sources " may be 
trusted in whatever relates to the acts of the Span- 
iards, and to the acts and personal characteristics of 
the Indians ; in whatever relates to their weapons, im- 
plements and utensils, fabrics, food and raiment, and 
things of a similar character." Only in what relates 
to their government, social relations, and plan of life 
does the narrative need to be in part rewritten. It 
is but fair to note that Prescott himself, in his pre- 
liminary chapters on the Aztecs, is far from dog- 
matising. His statements are made with a distinct 
reserve, and he acknowledges alike the difficulty of 
the subject and his doubts as to the finality of what 
he tells. Even in his descriptive passages, he is solici- 
tous lest the warm imagination of the Spanish chronic- 
lers may have led them to throw too high a light on 
what they saw. Thus, after ending his account of Mon- 
tezuma's household and the Aztec " court," drawn from 
the pages of Bernal Diaz, Toribio, and Oviedo, he quali- 
fies its gorgeousness in the following sentence : 1 — 
Mi. p. 125. 



158 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

" Such is the picture of Montezuma's domestic establish- 
ment and way of living as delineated by the Conquerors 
and their immediate followers, who had the best means of 
information ; too highly coloured, it may be, by the prone- 
ness to exaggerate which was natural to those who first wit- 
nessed a spectacle so striking to the imagination, so new and 
unexpected." 

And in a foot-note on the same page he expressly 
warns the student of history against the fanciful chap- 
ters of the Spaniards who wrote a generation later, 
comparing their accounts with the stories in the 
Arabian Nights. 

Putting aside, then, the single topic of Aztec eth- 
nology and tribal organisation, it remains to see how 
far the rest of Prescott's history of the Conquest has 
stood the test of recent criticism. Here one finds him- 
self on firmer ground, and it may be asserted with 
entire confidence that Prescott's accuracy cannot be 
impeached in aught that is essential to the truth of 
history. His careful use of his authorities, and his 
excellent judgment in checking the evidence of one 
by the evidence of another, remain unquestioned. In 
one respect alone has fault been found with him. His 
desire to avail himself of every possible aid caused 
him to procure, often with great difficulty and at 
great expense, documents, or copies of documents, 
which had hitherto been inaccessible to the investi- 
gator. So far he was acting in the spirit of the truly 
scientific scholar. But sometimes the very rarity of 
these new sources led him to attach an undue value 
to them. Here and there he has followed them as 
against the more accessible authorities, even when the 
latter were altogether trustworthy. In this we find 



viii.] "CONQUEST OF MEXICO" 159 

something of the passion of the collector; and now 
and then in minor matters it has led him into error. 1 
Thus, in certain passages relating to the voyage of 
Cortes from Havana, Prescott has misstated the course 
followed by the pilot, as again with regard to the ex- 
pedition from Santiago de Cuba 2 ; and he errs because 
he has followed a manuscript copy of Juan Diaz, over- 
looking the obviously correct and consistent accounts 
of Bernal Diaz and other standard chroniclers. There 
are similar though equally unimportant slips elsewhere 
in his narrative, arising from the same cause. None 
of them, however, affects the essential accuracy of his 
text. His masterpiece stands to-day still fundament- 
ally unshaken, a faithful and brilliant panorama of 
a wonderful episode in history. Those who are in- 
clined to question its veracity do so, not because they 
can give substantial reasons for their doubt, but be- 
cause, perhaps, of the romantic colouring which Pres- 
cott has infused into his whole narrative, because it is 
as entertaining as a novel, and because he had the art 
to transmute the acquisitions of laborious research 
into an enduring monument of pure literature. 

1 " Though remarkably fair and judicious in the main, Mr. Pres- 
cott's partiality for a certain class of his material is evident. To 
the copies from the Spanish archives, most of which have been 
since published with hundreds of others equally or more valuable, 
he seemed to attach an importance proportionate to their cost. 
Thus, throughout his entire work, these papers are paraded to 
the exclusion of the more reliable, but more accessible standard 
authorities." — H. H. Bancroft, History of Mexico, i. p. 7, Note. 

2 i. pp. 222, 224. 



CHAPTER IX 

" THE CONQUEST OF PERU " — " PHILIP II. " 

The Conquest of Peru was, for the most part, written 
more rapidly than any other of Prescott's histories. 
Much of the material necessary for it had been ac- 
quired during his earlier studies, and with this mate- 
rial he had been long familiar when he began to write. 
The book was, indeed, as he himself described it, a 
pendant to the Conquest of Mexico. Had the latter 
work not been written, it is likely that the Conquest 
of Peru would be now accepted as the most popular 
of Prescott's works. Unfortunately, it is always sub- 
jected to a comparison with the other and greater book, 
and therefore, relatively, it suffers. In the first place, 
when so compared, it resembles an imperfect replica 
of the Mexico rather than an independent history. 
The theme is, in its nature, the same, and so it lacks 
the charm of novelty. The exploits of Pizarro do not 
merely recall to the modern reader the adventurous 
achievements of Cortes, but, as a matter of fact, they 
were actually inspired by them. Thus, Pizarro's 
march from the coast over the Andes closely resem- 
bles the march of Cortes over the Cordilleras. His 
seizure of the Inca, Atahualpa, was undoubtedly sug- 
gested to him by the seizure of Montezuma. The 
massacre of the Peruvians in Caxamarca reads like 
a reminiscence of the massacre of the Aztecs by Alva- 

160 



chaimx.] " CONQUEST OF PERU" — " PHILIP II." 161 

rado in Mexico. The fighting, if fighting it may be 
called, presents the same features as are found in the 
battles of Cortes. So far as there is any difference in 
the two narratives, this difference is not in favour 
of the later book. If Pizarro bears a likeness to 
Cortes, the likeness is but superficial. His soul is the 
soul of Cortes habitans in sicco. There is none of the 
frankness of the conqueror of Mexico, none of his 
chivalry, little of his bluff good comradeship. Pizarro 
rather impresses one as mean-spirited, avaricious, and 
cruel, so that we hold lightly his undoubted courage, 
his persistency, and his endurance. Moreover, the 
Peruvians are too feeble as antagonists to make the 
record of their resistance an exciting one. They lack 
the ferocity of the Aztec character, and when they are 
slaughtered by the white men, the tale is far more 
pitiful than stirring. Even Prescott's art cannot make 
us feel that there is anything romantic in the conquest 
and butchery of a flock of sheep. The outrages per- 
petrated upon an effeminate people by their Spanish 
masters form a long and dreary record of robbery and 
rape and it is inevitably monotonous. 

Another fundamental defect in the subject which 
Prescott chose was thoroughly appreciated by him. 
"Its great defect," he wrote in 1845, "is want of 
unity. A connected tissue of adventures . . . but 
not the especial interest that belongs to the Iliad and 
to the Conquest of Mexico " In another memorandum 
(made in 1846) he calls his subject "second rate, — 
quarrels of banditti over their spoils." This criticism 
is absolutely just, and it well explains the inferiority 
of the story of Peru when we contrast it with the book 
which went before. Up to the capture of the Inca 



162 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

there is no lack of unity ; but after that, the stream of 
narration filters away in different directions, like some 
river which grows broader and shallower until at last 
in a multitude of little streams it disappears in dry 
and sandy soil. The fault is not the fault of the 
writer. It is inherent in the subject. Nowhere has 
Prescott written with greater skill. It is only that 
no display of literary art can give dignity and dis- 
tinction to that which in itself is unheroic and some- 
times even sordid. The one passage which stands out 
from all the rest is that which sets before us the famous 
incident at Panama, when Pizarro, at the head of his 
little band of followers, mutinous, famished, and half- 
naked, still boldly scorns all thought of a return. 

" Drawing his sword he traced a line with it on the sand 
from East to West. Then, turning towards the South, 
' Friends and comrades ! ' he said, i on that side are toil, hun- 
ger, nakedness, the drenching storm, desertion, and death ; on 
this side ease and pleasure. There lies Peru with its riches ; 
here, Panama and its poverty. Choose, each man, what best 
becomes a brave Castilian. For my part, I go to the South/ 
So saying, he stepped across the line." 

Here is an heroic event told with that simplicity 
which means effectiveness. This is the one page 
in the Peru where the narrator makes us thrill 
with a sense of what, in its way, verges upon moral 
sublimity. 

As to the historical value of the book, it stands in 
much the same category as the Conquest of Mexico. 
All that relates to the actual history of the Conquest 
is told with the same accurate regard for the original 
authorities which Prescott always showed, and for this 
part of the narrative, the original authorities are 



ix ] "CONQUEST OF PERU " — " PHILIP II." 103 

worthy of credence. The preliminary chapters on 
Peruvian antiquities are less satisfactory even than 
the corresponding portions of the other book. Pres- 
cott found them very hard to write. He was conscious 
that the subject was a formidable one. He did the 
best he could and all that any one could possibly 
have done at the time in which he wrote. Even now, 
after the elaborate explorations and researches of 
Bandelier, Markham, Baessler, Cunow, and others, the 
social and political relations of the Peruvians are 
little understood. Much has been learned of their art 
and of the monuments which they have left behind ; 
but of their institutional history the records still re- 
main obscure. The modern student, however, discov- 
ers many indications that they, too, like the Aztecs, 
were of the Eed Race, and that their government was 
based upon the clan system; so that even the Inca 
himself, like the Mexican war-chief, was merely the 
elected executive of a council of the gentes. Here, as 
in Mexico, the Spaniards carelessly described in terms 
of Europe the institutions which they found, and 
made no serious attempt to understand them. Even 
the account of the Peruvian religion which Prescott 
gives, in accordance with the statements of the early 
Catholic missionaries, needs considerable modification. 1 
The Spanish chroniclers whom Prescott followed 
describe the Peruvians as united under a great mon- 
archy, — an " empire, " — the head of which, the Inca, 
was an hereditary and absolute ruler, whose person 
was sacred in that he was divine and the sole giver of 
law. The system was, therefore, a theocratic one, with 
the chief priest appointed by the Inca. There was a 

i Briuton, Myths of the New World, p. 52 (Philadelphia, 1868). 



164 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

nobility, but the great offices of state were filled by 
the members of the imperial family. The rule of the 
Inca extended over a vast territory, and of it he was 
the supreme lord, having his wives from among the 
Virgins of the Sun, the fifteen hundred beautiful maid- 
ens who abode in the Palace of the Sun in Cuzco. Over 
the wonderful system of roads which intersected the 
empire, the couriers of the Inca passed back and forth 
with the commands of their master, to which all gave 
heed. The Peruvian religion was strongly monothe- 
istic in that it recognised the unity and preeminence 
of a supreme deity. 

Eecent investigation has left practically nothing of 
this interesting fiction which has been repeated by 
hundreds of writers with every possible magnificence 
of detail. There was no "empire" of Peru. The 
Indians of the coast governed themselves, though they 
sometimes paid tribute to the Cuzco Indians. There 
was, however, no homogeneous nationality. In the 
valley of Cuzco there was a tribe known as the Inca, 
perhaps seventy thousand souls in all, who were locally 
divided into twelve clans, each having its own govern- 
ment, and dwelling in its own village or ward; for it 
was a combination of these twelve villages which made 
up the whole settlement collectively styled Cuzco. A 
council of the twelve clans chose a war-chief whom 
some of the other tribes called " Inca," but who was 
not so called by his own people. He was not an 
hereditary chief ; he could be deposed ; he had no 
especial sanctity. The Virgins of the Sun were some- 
thing very different from virgins. The road system 
of the Peruvians really constituted no system at all. 
The nobles were not nobles. The religion was not 



ix. ] "CONQUEST OF PERU " — «• PHILIP II." 166 

monotheistic, but embodied the worship not only of 
sun, moon, and stars, but of rocks, mountains, stone 
idols, and a variety of fetishes. Metal-work, pottery, 
weaving, and building were the chief arts of the Peru- 
vians; but in them all, quaintness, utility, and per- 
manence were more conspicuous than beauty. 1 

Disregarding, however, all questions of Peruvian 
archaeology, we may accept the judgment passed upon 
the Conquest of Pent by one of the most eminent of 
modern investigators, Sir Clements Markham, who, as 
a young man, knew Prescott well, and to whom the 
reading of this book proved to be an inspiration in his 
chosen field. Long after Prescott's death, and speak- 
ing with the fuller knowledge of the subject which he 
had acquired, he declared of the Peru : " It deservedly 
stands in the first rank as a judicious history of the 
Conquest." 

The History of the Reign of Philip II. remains an 
unfinished work. Its subject, of course, provokes a 
comparison with the two brilliant histories by Motley, 
— TJte Rise of the Dutch Republic and Tlxe History of the 
United Netherlands. The interest in this comparison 
lies in the view which each of the historians has taken 
of the gloomy Philip. The contrasted temperaments of 
the two writers are well indicated in a letter which Mot- 
ley sent to Prescott after the first volume of Philip II. 
had appeared. He wrote : — 

" I can vouch for its extraordinary accuracy both of nar- 
ration and of portrait-painting. You do not look at people 

1 See the section by Markham on " The Inca Civilisation in Peru/' 
in Winsor, A Narrative and Critical History of America, vol. i. 
(Boston, 1889) ; and an interesting summary of the results of eleven 
years researches by Bandelier in a paper entitled " The Truth about 
Inca Civilisation," published in Harper's Magazine for March, 1905. 



166 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

or events from my point of view, but I am, therefore, a 
better witness to your fairness and clearness of delineation 
and statement. You have by nature the judicial mind which 
is the costume de rigueur of all historians. ... I haven't the 
least of it — I am always in a passion when I write and so 
shall be accused, very justly perhaps, of the qualities for 
which Byron commended Mitford, ' wrath and partiality/ " 

The two men, indeed, approached their subject in 
very different fashion. In Motley, rigidly scientific 
though he was, there are always a touch of emotion, a 
love of liberty, a hatred of oppression. He once wrote 
to his father that it gratified him " to pitch into the 
Duke of Alva and Philip II. to my heart's content." 
Prescott, on the other hand, was more detached, partly 
because he was by nature tolerant and calm ; and it 
may be also because his protracted Spanish studies had 
given him unconsciously the Spanish point of view. 
He even came at last to adopt this theory himself, 
and he wrote of it in a humorous way. Thus to Lady 
Lyell, he declared : — 

" If I should go to heaven ... I shall find many acquaint- 
ances there, and some of them very respectable, of the olden 
time. . . . Don't you think I should have a kindly greeting 
from good Isabella ? Even Bloody Mary, I think, will smile on 
me ; for I love the old Spanish stock, the house of Trastamara. 
But there is one that I am sure will owe me a grudge, and 
that is the very man I have been making two good volumes 
upon. With all my good nature, I can't wash him even into 
the darkest French grey. He is black and all black. . . . 
Is it not charitable to give Philip a place in heaven ? " 

Again, he styles Philip one " who may be considered 
as to other Catholics what a Puseyite is to other Protes- 
tants." And elsewhere he confesses to "a sneaking 
fondness for Philip." It was very like him, this hesi- 



•CONQUEST OF PERU " — " PHILIP II." 107 

tation to condemn ; and it recalls a memorandum which 
he made while writing his Peru: "never call hard 
names a la Southey." Hence in a letter of his to 
Motley, who had sent him a copy of the Dutch Republic, 

— a letter which forms an interesting complement to 
Motley's note to him, he wrote: — 

M You have laid it on Philip rather hard. Indeed, you 
have whittled him down to such an imperceptible point that 
there is hardly enough of him left to hang a newspaper 
paragraph on, much less five or six volumes of solid history 
as I propose to do. But then, you make it up with your 
own hero, William of Orange, and I comfort myself with 
the reflection that you are looking through a pair of Dutch 
spectacles after all." 

Prescott's Philip II. raised no such questions of ac- 
curacy as followed upon the publications of the Mexican 
and Peruvian histories. As in the case of the Ferdi- 
nand and Isabella, the sources were unimpeachable, first- 
hand, and contained the more intimate revelations of 
incident and motive. There were no archaeological 
problems to be solved, no obscure racial puzzles to per- 
plex the investigator. The reign of Philip had simply 
to be interpreted in the light of the revelations which 
Philip himself and his contemporaries left behind them 

— often in papers which were never meant for more 
than two pairs of eyes. How complete are these revela- 
tions, one may learn from a striking passage written 
by Motley, who speaks in it of the abundant stores 
of knowledge which lie at the disposal of the modern 
student of history. 

M To him who has the patience and industry, many mys- 
teries are thus revealed, which no political sagacity or criti- 
cal acumen could have divined. He leans over the shoulder 
of Philip the Second at his writing-table, as the King spells 



1G8 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

patiently out, with cipher-key in hand, the most concealed 
hieroglyphics of Parma, or Guise, or Mendoza. ... He enters 
the cabinet of the deeply pondering Burghleigh, and takes 
from the most private drawer the memoranda which record 
that minister's unutterable doubtings ; he pulls from the dress- 
ing-gown folds of the stealthy, soft-gliding Walsingham the 
last secret which he has picked from the Emperor's pigeon- 
holes or the Pope's pocket. ... He sits invisible at the most 
secret councils of the Nassaus and Barne veldt and Buys, or 
pores with Farnese over coming victories and vast schemes 
of universal conquest ; he reads the latest bit of scandal, the 
minutest characteristic of King or minister, chronicled by 
his gossiping Venetians for the edification of the Forty." 1 

All this material and more was in Prescott's hands, 
and he made full use of it. His narrative, moreover, 
was told in a style which was easy and unstudied, 
less glowing than in the Mexico, but even better 
fitted for the telling of events which were so preg- 
nant with good and ill to succeeding generations. 
In the pages of Philip II. we have neither the some- 
what formal student who wrote of Ferdinand and 
Isabella, nor the romanticist whose imagination was 
kindled by the reports of Cortes. Bather do we find 
one who has at last reached the highest levels of his- 
torical writing, and who with perfect poise develops a 
noble theme in a noble way. The only criticism which 
has ever been brought against the book has come 
from those who, like Thoreau, regard literary finish 
a,s a defect in historical composition. The author of 
Walden seemed, indeed, to single out Prescott for 
special animadversion in this respect, and his rather 
rasping sentences contain the only jarring notes that 
were sounded by any contemporary of the historian. 

1 Motley, History of the United Netherlands, i. p. 54. 



ix] " CONQUEST OF PERU " — " PHILIP II.' 1 169 

Tlioieau, writing of the colonial historians of Massa- 
chusetts, such as Josselyn, remarked with a sort of 
perverse appreciation : " They give you one piece of 
nature at any rate, and that is themselves, smacking 
their lips like a coach- whip, — none of those emascu- 
lated modern histories, such as Prescott's, cursed with 
a style/' 

If style be really a curse to an historian, then Pres- 
cott remained under its ban to the very last. As a 
bit of vivid writing his description of the battle of 
Lepanto was much admired, and Irving thought it 
the best thing in the book. A bit of it may be quoted 
by way of showing that Prescott in his later years lost 
nothing of his vivacity or of his fondness for battle- 
scenes. 

First we see the Turkish armament moving up to 
battle against the allied fleets : — 

" The galleys spread out, as usual with the Turks, in the 
form of a regular half -moon, covering a wider exten t of sur- 
face than the combined fleets, which they somewhat exceeded 
in number. They presented, indeed, as they drew nearer, a 
magnificent array, with their gilded and gaudily-painted 
prows, and their myriads of pennons and streamers fluttering 
gayly in the breeze; while the rays of the morning sun 
glanced on the polished scimitars of Damascus, and on the 
superb aigrettes of jewels which sparkled in the turbans 
of the Ottoman chiefs. . . . The distance between the two 
fleets was now rapidly diminishing. At this solemn moment 
a death-like silence reigned throughout the armament of the 
confederates. Men seemed to hold their breath, as if ab- 
sorbed in the expectation of some great catastrophe. The 
day was magnificent. A light breeze, still adverse to the 
Turks, played on the waters, somewhat fretted by the con- 
trary winds. It was nearly noon ; and as the sun, mounting 
through a cloudless sky, rose to the zenith, he seemed to 



170 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

pause, as if to look down on the beautiful scene, where the 
multitude of galleys moving over the water, showed like 
a holiday spectacle rather than a preparation for mortal 
combat." 

Then we have the two fleets in the thick of combat : — 

" The Pacha opened at once on his enemy a terrible fire 
of cannon and musketry. It was returned with equal spirit 
and much more effect ; for the Turks were observed to shoot 
over the heads of their adversaries. The Moslem galley was 
unprovided with the defences which protected the sides of 
the Spanish vessels; and the troops, crowded together on 
the lofty prow, presented an easy mark to their enemy's 
balls. But though numbers of them fell at every discharge, 
their places were soon supplied by those in reserve. They 
were enabled, therefore, to keep up an incessant fire, which 
wasted the strength of the Spaniards ; and, as both Christian 
and Mussulman fought with indomitable spirit, it seemed 
doubtful to which side victory would incline. . . . 

" Thus the fight raged along the whole extent of the 
entrance to the Gulf of Lepanto. The volumes of vapour 
rolling heavily over the waters effectually shut out from sight 
whatever was passing at any considerable distance, unless 
when a fresher breeze dispelled the smoke for a moment, or 
the flashes of the heavy guns threw a transient gleam on the 
dark canopy of battle. If the eye of the spectator could 
have penetrated the cloud of smoke that enveloped the com- 
batants, and have embraced the whole scene at a glance, he 
would have perceived them broken up into small detach- 
ments, separately engaged one with another, independently 
of the rest, and indeed ignorant of all that was doing in 
other quarters. The contest exhibited few of those large 
combinations and skilful manoeuvres to be expected in a 
great naval encounter. It was rather an assemblage of petty 
actions, resembling those on land. The galleys, grappling 
together, presented a level arena, on which soldier and gal- 
ley-slave fought hand to hand, and the fate of the engage- 
ment was generally decided by boarding. As in most 
hand-to-hand contests, there was an enormous waste of life. 



ix] "CONQUEST OF PERU" — "PHILIP II." 171 

The decks were loaded with corpses, Christian and Moslem 
lying promiscuously together in the embrace of death. In- 
stances are recorded where every man on board was slain or 
wounded. It was a ghastly spectacle, where blood flowed 
in rivulets down the sides of the vessels, staining the waters 
of the Gulf for miles around. 

" It seemed as if a hurricane had swept over the sea and 
covered it with the wreck of the noble armaments which a 
moment before were so proudly riding on its bosom. Little 
had they now to remind one of their late magnificent array, 
with their hulls battered, their masts and spars gone or 
splintered by the shot, their canvas cut into shreds and float- 
ing wildly on the breeze, while thousands of wounded and 
drowning men were clinging to the floating fragments and 
calling piteously for help." 

Had Prescott lived, his history of Philip II. would 
have been extended to a greater length than any of 
his other books — probably to six volumes instead of 
the three which are all that he ever finished. It is 
likely, too, that this book would have constituted his 
surest claim to high rank as an historian. He came 
to the writing of it with a mind stored with the accu- 
mulations of twenty years of patient, conscientious 
study. He had lost none of his charm as a writer, 
while he had acquired laboriously that special know- 
ledge and training which are needed in one who would 
be a master of historical research. Philip II shows 
on every page the skill with which information drawn 
from multifarious sources can be massed and mar- 
shalled by one who is not only documented but who 
has thoroughly assimilated everything of value which 
his documents contain. No better evidence of Prescott's 
thoroughness is needed than the tribute which was 
paid to him by Motley, who had diligently gleaned in 
the same field. He said: "I am astonished at your 



172 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. ix. 

omniscenee. Nothing seems to escape you. Many a 
little trait of character, scrap of intelligence, or dab of 
scene-painting which I had kept in my most private 
pocket, thinking I had fished it out of unsunned 
depths, I find already in your possession." 1 

And we may well join with Motley in his expression 
of regret that so solid a piece of historical composition 
should remain unfinished. Writing from Rome to Mr. 
William Amory soon after Prescott's death, Motley 
said : — 

" I feel inexpressibly disappointed . . . that the noble 
and crowning monument of his life, for which he had laid 
such massive foundations, and the structure of which had 
been carried forward in such a grand and masterly manner, 
must remain uncompleted, like the unfinished peristyle of 
some stately and beautiful temple on which the night of 
time has suddenly descended." 2 

1 Quoted by Ogden, Prescott, p. 32. 

2 Cited by R. C. Winthrop, address before the Massachusetts 
Historical Society, June 14, 1877. 



CHAPTER X 

prescott's rank as an historian 

In forming an estimate of Prescott's rank among 
American writers of history, one's thought inevitably 
associates him with certain of his contemporaries. The 
Spanish subjects which he made his own invite a direct 
comparison with Irving. His study of the sombre 
Philip compels us to think at once of Motley. The 
broadly general theme of his first three books — the 
extension of European domination over the New World 
— brings him into a direct relation to Francis Parkman. 
The comparison with Irving is more immediately 
suggested by the fact that had Prescott not entered 
the field precisely when he did, the story of Cortes 
and of the Mexican conquest would have been written 
by Irving. How fortunate was the chance which gave 
the task to Prescott must be obvious to all who are 
familiar with the writings of both men. It has been 
said that in Irving's hands literature would have prof- 
ited at the expense of history ; but even this is too 
much of a concession. Irving, even as a stylist, was 
never at his best in serious historical composition. 
His was not the spirit which gladly undertakes a work 
de longue haleine, nor was his genial, humorous nature 
suited to the gravity of such an undertaking. His 
fame had been won, and fairly won, in quite another 
field, — a field in which his personal charm, his mellow 
though far from deep philosophy of life, and his often 

173 



174 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

whimsical enjoyment of his own world could find 
spontaneous and individual expression. The labour 
of research, the comparison of authorities, the long 
months of hard reading and steady note-taking, were 
not congenial to his nature. He moved less freely 
in the heavy armour of the historian than in the 
easy-fitting modern garb of the essayist and story- 
teller. The best that one can say of the style of his 
Granada, his Columbus, and his Washington is that 
it is smooth, well-worded, and correct. It shows little 
of the real distinction which we find in many of his 
shorter papers, — in that on Westminster Abbey, for 
example, and on English opinion of America ; while 
the peculiar flavour which makes his account of Little 
Britain so delightful is wholly absent. 

On the purely historical side, the two men are in 
wholly different classes. Irving resembled Livy in 
his use of the authorities. Such sources as were 
ready to his hand and easy to consult, he used with 
conscientious care ; but those that were farther afield, 
and for the mastery of which both time and labour 
were demanded, he let alone. Thus, his history of 
Columbus was prepared in something less than two 
years, in which period both his preliminary studies 
and the actual composition were completed. Yet this 
book was the one over which he took the greatest 
pains, and for which he made his only serious attempt 
at something like original investigation. His Ma- 
homet was confessedly written at second hand ; while in 
his Washington he followed in the main such records 
and already published works as were convenient. In 
the Granada he only plays with history, and ascribes 
the main portion of the narrative to a mythical ecclesi- 



x.] PRESCOTTS RANK AS AN HISTORIAN 175 

astic, " the worthy Fray Antonio Agapida," in whose 
lineaments we may not infrequently detect a strong 
family resemblance to the no less worthy Diedrich 
Knickerbocker. In the letter which Irving wrote to 
Prescott, relinquishing to him the subject of Cortes, 
he lets us see quite plainly the very moderate amount 
of reading which he had been doing. 1 He had dipped 
into Solis, Bernal Diaz, and Herrera, using them, so 
he said, "as guide-books." Upon the basis of this 
reading he had sketched out the entire narrative, 
and had fallen to work upon the actual history with 
the intention of "working up" other material as he 
went along. When we compare these easy-going 
methods with the scientific thoroughness of Prescott, 
his ransacking, by agents, of every important library 
in Europe, his great collection of original documents, 
the many years which he gave to the study of them, 
and the conscientious judgment with which he weighed 
and balanced them, we cannot fail to see how much 
the world has gained by Irving's act of generous self- 
abnegation. It is only fair to add that he himself, at 
the time when Prescott wrote to him, was beginning to 
doubt whether he had not undertaken a task unsuited 
to his inclinations and beyond his powers. "Ever 
since I have been meddling with the theme," he said, 
"its grandeur and magnificence had been growing upon 
me, and I had felt more and more doubtful whether I 
should be able to treat it conscientiously, — that is to 
say, with the extensive research and thorough investi- 
gation which it merited." 

Professor Jameson hazards the conjecture 2 that Ir- 

i Letter of January 18, 1839. 

2 Historical Writing in America, pp. 97-98. 



176 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

ving's real importance in the development of Ameri- 
can historiography is not at all to be discerned in the 
serious works which have just been mentioned, but 
rather in his quaintly humorous picture of New York 
under the Dutch, contained in the pretended narra- 
tion of Diedrich Knickerbocker, and published as 
early as 1809. There can be no doubt that, as Pro- 
fessor Jameson says, this book did much to excite 
both interest and curiosity concerning the Dutch 
regime. "Very likely the great amount of work 
which the state government did for the historical 
illustration of the Dutch period, through the re- 
searches of Mr. Brodhead in foreign archives, had 
this unhistorical little book as one of its principal 
causes." Here, indeed, is only one more illustration 
of the fact that the work which one does in his natu- 
ral vein and in his own way is certain not only to 
be his best, but to exercise a genuine influence in 
spheres which at the time were quite beyond the 
writer's consciousness. 

Something has already been said concerning Pres- 
cott in his relationship to Motley as an historian. A 
brief but more explicit comparison may be added 
here. The diligence and zeal of the investigator both 
men shared on even terms. The only advantage which 
Motley possessed was the opportunity, denied to Pres- 
cott, of prosecuting his own researches, of discovering 
his own materials, and of visiting and living in the 
very places of which he had to write, instead of work- 
ing largely through the eyes and brains of other men. 
This was a very real advantage ; for the inspiration of 
the search and of the scenes themselves gave a keen 
stimulus to the ambition of the scholar and a glow to 



x] PRESCOTT'S RANK AS AN HISTORIAN 177 

the imagination of the writer. One attaches less im- 
portance to Motley's academic training; for while it 
was broader than that of Prescott, and comprised the 
valuable teaching which was given him in the two 
great universities of Berlin and Gottingen, we cannot 
truthfully assert that Prescott's equipment was inferior 
to that of his contemporary. Indeed, Ferdinand and 
Isabella and Philip II. can better stand the test of 
searching criticism than Motley's Dutch Republic. 

Motley is, indeed, the most "literary" of all the so- 
called " literary historians." In the glow and fervour 
of his narrative he is unsurpassed. He feels all the 
passion of the times whereof he writes, and he makes 
the reader feel it too. He has, moreover, a power of 
drawing character which Prescott seldom shows and 
which, when he shows it, he shows in less degree. 
Motley writes with the magnetism of a great pleader 
and with something also of the imagination of a poet. 
Unlike Prescott, he understands the philosophy of his- 
tory and delves beneath the surface to search out and 
reveal the hidden causes of events. Yet first and last 
and all the time, he is a partisan. He is pleading for a 
cause far more than he is seeking for impartial truth. 
In this respect he resembles Mom m sen, whose Romische 
Geschichte is likewise in its later books a splendid piece 
of partisanship. Motley is an American and a Protes- 
tant, and therefore he is eloquent for liberty and 
harsh toward what he views as superstition. Will- 
iam the Silent is his hero just as Csesar is Momm- 
sen's, and he hates tyranny as Mommsen hated the 
insolence of the Roman Junkerthum. This vivid feel- 
ing springing from intensity of conviction makes both 
books true masterpieces, nor to the critical scholar 



178 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. 

does it greatly lessen their value as historical composi- 
tions. Yet in each, one has continually to check the 
writer, to modify his statements, and to make allow- 
ance for his very individual point of view. In reading 
Prescott, on the other hand, nothing of the sort is nec- 
essary. He is free from the passion of politics, his 
judgment is impartial, and those who read him feel, 
as an eminent scholar has remarked, that they are 
listening to a wise and learned judge rather than to a 
skilful advocate. Even in the sphere of characterisa- 
tion, Prescott is more sound than Motley, even though 
he be not half so forceful. Ee-reading many of the 
portraits which the latter has drawn for us in glowing 
colours, the student of human nature will perceive 
that they are quite impossible. Take, for instance, 
Motley's Philip and compare it with the Philip whom 
Prescott has described for us. The former is not a man 
at all. He is either a devil, or a lunatic, or it may be a 
blend of each. Indeed, Motley himself in conversa- 
tion used to describe him as a devil, though he once 
remarked, "He is not my head devil." Everywhere 
Philip is depicted in the same sable hues, without a 
touch of light to relieve the blackness of his character. 
On the other hand, Prescott shows us one who, with 
all his cruelty, his hypocrisy, and his superstition, is 
still quite comprehensible because, after all, he remains 
a human being. Prescott discovers and records in him 
some qualities of which Motley in his sweeping con- 
demnation takes no heed. We see a Philip scrupu- 
lously faithful to his duty as he understands it, bearing 
toil and loneliness, patient to his secretaries, gracious 
to his petitioners, whom he tries to set at ease, gener- 
ous in his patronage of art, and putting aside all his 



x] PRESCOTT'S RANK AS AN HISTORIAN 179 

coldness and reserve while watching the progress of 
his favourite architects and builders. These things and 
others like them count perhaps for very little in one 
sense ; yet in another they bring out the fact that Pres- 
cott viewed his subject in the clear light of historic 
truth rather than in the glare of fiery prejudice. 

There are some who would rate Parkman above 
Prescott. They speak of him as more truly an Ameri- 
can historian because the topic which he chose — the 
development of New France — has a direct bearing 
upon the national history of the United States. This, 
however, is at once to limit the word " American " in 
a thoroughly unreasonable way, and also to allow the 
choice of theme to prejudice one's judgment of the 
manner in which that theme is treated. Parkman, to 
be sure, has merits of his own, some of which are less 
discernible in Prescott. For picturesqueness, as for 
accuracy, both men are on a level. There is a 
greater freshness of feeling in Parkman, a sort of 
open air effect, which is redolent of his actual experi- 
ence of the great plains and the far Western mountains 
in the days which he passed among the Indian tribes. 
This cannot be expected of one whose physical infirmi- 
ties confined him to the limits of his library. But, on 
the other hand, Prescott chose a broader field, and he 
made that field more thoroughly his own. These two 
— Prescott and Parkman — must take rank not far 
apart. Between them, they have divided, so to speak, 
the early history of the American Continent in the 
sphere which lies beyond the bounds of purely Anglo- 
Saxon conquest. 

Disciples of the dismal school of history often yield 
a very grudging tribute to the enduring merit of what 



180 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT [chap. x. 

Prescott patiently achieved. Yet in their own field 
he met them upon equal terms and need not fear 
comparison. Though self-trained as an historical in- 
vestigator, his mastery of his authorities has hardly 
been excelled by those whose merit is found solely in 
their gift for delving. The evidence of his thorough- 
ness, his judgment, and his critical faculty is to be seen 
in the documentary treasures of his foot-notes. He 
did not, like Mommsen, write a brilliant narrative and 
leave the reader without the ready means of verifying 
what he wrote. He has, to use his own words, " suf- 
fered the scaffolding to remain after the building has 
been completed." Those who sneer at his array of 
testimony are none the less unable to impeach it. 
Though historical science has in many respects made 
great advances since his death, his work still stands 
essentially unshaken. He had the historical conscience 
in a rare degree ; one feels his fairness and is willing 
to accept his judgment. If he seems to lack a special 
gift for philosophical analysis, the plan and scope of 
his histories did not contemplate a subjective treat- 
ment. What he meant to do, he did, and he did it 
with a combination of historical exactness and literary 
artistry such as no other American, at least, has yet 
exhibited. Without the humour of Irving, or the fire 
of Motley, or the intimate touch of Parkman, he is 
superior to all three in poise and judgment and dis- 
tinction; so that on the whole one may accept the 
dictum of a distinguished scholar 1 who, in summing 
up the merits which we recognise in Prescott, declares 
them to be so conspicuous and so abounding as to 
place him at the head of all American historians. 
i Dr. C. K. Adams. 



INDEX 



Academy, Royal Spanish, 76, 
80. 

Adair, James, 146. 

Adams, Dr. C. K., quoted, 180. 

Adams, John Quincy, library 
of, 20 ; absence in Europe, 
20, 23, 37 ; professor at Har- 
vard, 23 ; Minister to Eng- 
land, 37. 

Adams, Sir William, 37. 

Albert, Prince, 105, 106. 

Amory, Thomas C, 43. 

Amory, William, letter to, 172. 

Athenaeum, Boston, 19, 20, 21. 

Aztecs, 76, 82, 136, 143, 144, 
146 ; as viewed by Wilson, 
147-151 ; Morgan's view of, 
152-155 ; later opinions re- 
garding, 156-156. 

B 

Bancroft, George, 10; letters 

to, 48, 114, 117 ; reviews 

Ferdinand and Isabella, 69 ; 

honour conferred on, 86 ; 

quoted, 87 ; estimate of, 122. 
Bancroft, H. H., quoted, 153, 

159. 
Bandelier, A. F., 155, 163, 165 ; 

quoted, 136, 153, 154. 
Bentley, Richard, 69, 80, 85, 

112, 116, 117. 



Bradford, Governor William, 8. 
Brougham, Lord, Prescott's 

description of, 107, 108. 
Brown, Charles Brockden, 

novels of, 5 ; Life of, 65, 112. 
Bunsen, Baron, 107, 108. 
Byron, Lord, Prescott's esti- 
mate of, 113 ; as exponent 

of romanticism, 122 ; quoted, 

166. 

C 
Calderon de La Barca, Senor, 

76, 91. 
Carlisle, Lord, Prescott's 

friendship with, 88, 91, 104, 

105, 106. 
Carlyle, Thomas, Prescott's 

comment on, 114. 
Channing, W. E., 28, 107, 124, 

126. 
Charles V., History of 117, 

118. 
Circourt, Comte Adolphede, 71. 
Club-Boom, edited by Prescott, 

42. 
Cogswell, J. G., 74, 75. 
Conde', History of the Arabs in 

Spain, 65, 130. 
Cooper, Sir Astley, 37. 
Corte's, Hernan, 134, 135, 155 ; 

quoted, 136 ; attack on Cholu- 

lans, 137, 138 ; retreat from 

Mexico, 141, 142 ; character 



181 



182 



WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT 



of, 143, 144, 147, 151 ; com- 
pared with Pizarro, 160, 161. 
Cushing, Caleb, 88. 

D 

Dante, Prescott's admiration 

for, 46. 
Daudet, Alphonse, 86. 
Dexter, Franklin, 42. 
Diaz, Bernal, 146, 159 ; quoted, 

144. 
Dickens, Charles, entertained 

by Prescott, 91 ; preferred by 

him to Thackeray, 115. 
Dumas, Alexandre, 115. 
Dunham, Dr. S. P., 70, 126. 

E 

Edwards, Jonathan, 7, 9. 
English, James, Prescott's sec- 
retary, 58, 59, 60, 61, 63, 64. 
Everett, A. H., 77, 
Everett, Edward, 25, 106. 



Farre, Dr., 37. 

Ferdinand and Isabella, begin- 
nings of, 52, 61 ; progress, 
62-65; completion and pub- 
lication, 66-71 ; success of, 
69-71, 77, 79, 95 ; style of, 
121, 127 ; historical accuracy, 
129, 130, 131, 132. 

Ford, Richard, criticises Ferdi- 
nand and Isabella, 70 ; his 
ridicule of Prescott's style, 
124-126 ; Prescott's reply, 
127, 128; quoted, 129, 130. 

Franklin, Benjamin, 5 ; style 
of, 129. 

G 

Gardiner, Rev. Dr. John S., 
18, 19. 



Gardiner, William, 20, 21, 22, 
40. 

Gayangos, Don Pascual de, 
reviews Ferdinand and Isa- 
bella, 70, 132 ; aids Prescott, 

76, 77, 101. 

Grenville, Thomas, quoted, 

142. 
Guatemozin, character of, 143, 

144 ; successor of Montezuma, 

135, 154. 
Guizot, M., reviews Philip II, 

116. 

H 

Hale, Edward Everett, quoted, 

77, 78. 

Hallain, Henry, praises Ferdi- 
nand and Isabella, 71 ; Pres- 
cott's acquaintance with, 108. 

Harper Brothers, publish Con- 
quest of Mexico, 79, 80 ; pub- 
lish Conquest of Peru, 84; 
Prescott's generosity to, 116. 

Harvard College, faculty of, in 
1811, 22, 23, 25; entrance 
examinations, 24 ; curricu- 
lum, 24, 25; methods, 25, 
26, 33 ; confers degree upon 
Prescott, 80. 

Hickling, Thomas, 15, 35, 
36. 

Higginson, Mehitable, 16. 

Higginson, T. W., 113. 

Hughes, Thomas, quoted, 55. 

Humboldt, Baron Alexander 
von, 81, 101. 



Irving, Washington, charac- 
teristics of, 5 ; quoted, 57 ; 

correspondence regarding 
Conquest of Mexico, 74-77 ; 



INDEX 



183 



praised by Prescott, 113; 
compared to Goldsmith, 122 ; 
style of, 124, 129; his Co- 
lumbus criticised by Prescott, 
134 ; comment on Philip II , 
169 ; compared with Pres- 
cott, 173-176, 180. 

J 

Jackson, Dr. James, 31. 
Jameson, Prof. J. F., quoted, 

3 n., 54 n., 176. 
Jeffrey, Lord, 108. 
Johnson, Dr. Samuel, quoted, 

54 ; style of, 122, 129. 



Kirk, John Foster, Prescott' s 
secretary, 87, 119, 136. 

Kirkland, Rev. Dr. John Thorn- 
ton, 22, 23. 

Knapp, Jacob Newman, 16. 



La Bruyere, quoted, 111. 

Lafitau, P&re, 145. 

Lawrence, Abbott, 103, 105 ; 

memoir of, 118. 
Lawrence, James, 97, 103. 
Lembke, Dr. J. B., Prescott's 

agent in Spain, 77, 100, 101. 
Linzee, Hannah, 43. 
Longfellow, Henry W., Pres- 
cott's admiration for, 113. 
Lowell, James Russell, 12, 23, 

103. 
Lyell, Lady, entertained by 

Prescott, 91 ; letter to, 115, 

166. 
Lyell, Sir Charles, 91, 103. 
Lynn, Prescott's house at, 97, 

98. 



M 

Macaulay, Lord, anecdotes of, 
108, 109 ; style of, 117, 133. 

Marina, 144. 

Markham, Sir Clements, judg- 
ment of Prescott's Peru, 165. 

Massachusetts Historical Soci- 
ety, 57, 86, 120, 142, 172. 

Mather, Cotton, his Magnolia^ 
8. 

Mexico, Conquest of, prepara- 
tions for, 72-77 ; four years 
of work on, 78-79 ; publica- 
tion and success of, 79-81, 
95 ; estimate of, 133-159. 

Middle States, literature in the, 
4-6. 

Middleton, Arthur, 26 ; aids 
Prescott in Spain, 77, 100. 

Mommsen, Theodor, as a parti- 
san compared with Motley, 
177, 178 ; compared with 
Prescott, 180. 

Montezuma, described by Pres- 
cott, 139, 143 ; Spaniards' 
view of, 153-156. 

Morgan, Lewis Henry, Indian 
researches of, 152, 153, 155, 
156 ; quoted, 157. 

Motley, J. L., quoted, 89, 165, 
166, 167, 168, 171, 172 ; com- 
pared with Prescott, 176-179, 
180. 

N 

Nahant, Prescott's cottage at, 
91,96, 97. 

Navarrete, M. F., 76, 80. 

New England, literature in, 
6-10 ; historians of, 10-12. 

Noctograph, description of, 57. 

Northumberland, Duke of, en- 
tertains Prescott, 110, 111. 



184 



WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT 



Ogden, Rollo, quoted, 93, 172. 
Oxford University, 38 ; confers 
degree on Prescott, 106, 107. 



Parkman, Prancis, style of, 
133, 146 ; compared with 
Prescott, 179, 180. 

Parr, Dr. Samuel, 18. 

Parsons, Theophilus, 42 ; 
quoted, 89. 

Peabody, Dr. A. P., Harvard 
Reminiscences, 22 w. 

Peel, Sir Robert, 104. 

Peirce, Benjamin, 25. 

Pepperell, Prescott's home at, 
96, 97. 

Peru, Conquest of, memorising 
of parts of, 59 ; composition 
and publication, 81, 82, 84, 
85, 95 ; estimate of, 160-165. 

Peruvians, 163-165. 

Phi Beta Kappa, 34. 

Philip II. , Prescott's memoris- 
ing of parts, 59; obstacles 
in way, 99-100 ; preparations 
for, 101, 102 ; two volumes 
completed, 115, 116, 117 ; 
third volume, 119 ; estimate 
of, 165-172 ; compared with 
Dutch Republic, 177. 

Pickering, John, memoir of, 86. 

Pizarro, Francisco, 160 ; char- 
acter of, 161 ; quoted, 162. 

Poe, Edgar Allan, 4. 

Prescott, Catherine Hickling, 
parentage and character, 15, 
16 ; rearing of son, 16. 

Prescott, Colonel William, 13, 
14, 43. 

Prescott, John, 13. 



Prescott, Oliver, 14. 

Prescott, Susan Amory, 69, 93 ; 
marriage to Prescott, 42, 43 ; 
character, 43 ; letters to, 104, 
105, 111. 

Prescott, William, birth and 
career, 14 ; characteristics 
of, 16, 82, 83 ; home, 14, 15 ; 
illness of, 17; removal to 
Boston, 17, 18 ; quoted, 67 ; 
death, 82. 

Prescott, William Hickling, 
literary importance of, 12; 
birth of , 15 ; his first teachers, 
16; traits as a boy, 16, 17; 
prepares for college, 18, 19 ; 
his tastes in reading, 19, 20 ; 
amusements, 20, 21, 22 ; can- 
didate for Harvard, 22 ; letter 
to father about examination, 
26, 26 ; enters college, 27 ; 
his studies and ideals, 27 ; 
love of pleasure, 28 ; laxity 
of conduct, 28, 29, 30 ; acci- 
dent, 31 ; loss of eye, 31 ; 
effect on character, 32 ; mag- 
nanimity, 32 ; returns to col- 
lege, 32 ; dislike for mathe- 
matics, 33 ; commencement 
poem, 33, 34 ; election to Phi 
Beta Kappa, 34 ; studies law, 
34 ; second illness and tem- 
porary blindness, 34, 35 ; 
sails for Azores, 35, 36 ; third 
illness, 36 ; first visit to 
London, 36, 37 ; visits Paris 
and Italy, 37, 38 ; returns to 
England, 38 ; sails for home, 
38 ; anxiety regarding career, 
39, 40 ; vicarious reading, 40, 
41 ; first attempts at compo- 
sition, 41, 42, 46 ; marriage, 



INDEX 



185 



42, 43 ; resolves to become 
a man of letters, 44 ; studies 
languages, 46, 46, 47; inter- 
est in Spanish, 47, 48 ; drift 
toward historical composi- 
tion, 49, 60; perplexity in 
choosing subject, 60, 61, 62; 
decides upon Ferdinand and 
Isabella, 62, 53; difficulties 
of task, 64, 55 ; time of 
preparation and composition, 
55, 66, 62, 66 ; his methods, 
of work, 66, 57, 58, 59, 61 ; 
his memory, 33, 57, 58, 59 ; 
his mode of life, 59, 60, 61, 
62 ; death of daughter, 62, 63, 
73 ; contributes to periodi- 
cals, 64, 65 ; completes Fer- 
dinand and Isabella, 66 ; 
search for publisher, 66, 67 ; 
terms of contract, 67 ; suc- 
cess of book, 68, 69, 70, 71, 
72, 95 ; criticisms, 69, 70, 71 ; 
theological studies and be- 
liefs, 73, 74 ; begins Mexican 
researches, 74, 75, 76, 77 ; 
correspondence with Irving, 
76 ; writes Conquest of 
Mexico, 78, 79; contract 
with the Harpers, 79, 80 ; 
honours conferred upon, 80, 
81 ; writes Conquest of 
Peru, 81, 82, 84 ; reception 
of book, 85, 86; death of 
father, 82 ; opinion of Ameri- 
can critics, 85 ; period of in- 
activity, 83, 86 ; political 
views, 89, 90 ; entertainment 
of friends, 91, 92, 93; his 
boyish ways, 93 ; his tact- 
lessness, 93 ; his Yankeeisms, 
94 ; preparations for Philip 



II. , 99, 100, 101, 102; his 
Boston residence, 83, 96 ; 
the homestead at Pepperell, 
96, 97 ; his cottage at Nahant, 
96, 97 ; cottage at Lynn, 97, 
98 ; third visit to England, 
94, 102-111 ; presented at 
court, 105 ; his sensibility, 
110 ; at zenith of his fame, 
111, 112 ; his opinions of 
contemporary writers, 112, 
113, 114, 115; completes two 
volumes of Philip II., 115, 

116, 117; rewrites conclusion 
of Robertson's Charles V., 

117, 118 ; health fails, 118 ; 
completes third volume of 
Philip II., 119; death, 
119; his burial, 119, 120; 
style and accuracy of Fer- 
dinand and Isabella, 121- 
131 ; criticised by Ford, 124, 
125, 126 ; his place as an his- 
torian, 173-181. 

Q 

Quincy, Josiah, 7, 26. 

R 

Raumer, Friedrich von, 81. 

Review, Edinburgh, notices of 
Prescott's books, 70, 76, 85, 
116. 

Review, English Quarterly, 46, 
70, 85. 

Review, North American, Pres- 
cott's contributions to, 41, 
46, 64, 65 ; its notices of 
Prescott's books, 62, 69. 

Robertson, William, 117, 146. 

Rogers, Samuel, 108, 109. 



186 



WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT 



S 

Scott, General Winfield, 90, 91. 

Scott, Sir Walter, 6, 86, 108, 
122 ; a favourite of Pres- 
cott's, 41, 115 ; quoted, 129. 

Shepherd, Dr. W. R. 100 n. 

Simancas, archives at, 99, 100. 

Southern States, literature in 
the, 2-4. 

Southey, Robert, 20, 67; 
praises Ferdinand and Isa- 
bella, 71 ; quoted, 107. 

Sparks, Jared, 12, 42 ; esti- 



Prescott, 46, 65, 68, 88. 
Stith, Dr. W., quoted, 3. 
Story, Judge Joseph, 25. 
Sumner, Charles, Prescott' s 

friendship with, 88, 89, 90. 



Talleyrand, quoted, 11. 

Thackeray, W. M., 43, 86; 
entertained by Prescott, 91, 
114 ; tribute to Prescott, 114, 
115. 



Thierry, Augustin, 64, 86. 

Thoreau, Henry D., quoted, 
168, 169. 

Ticknor, George, 26, 94, 111 ; 
quoted, 19, 22, 26, 28, 43, 
48, 71, 84, 103, 127 ; letters 
to, 46, 69, 70, 107, 117, 118 ; 
reads to Prescott, 47. 

Tocqueville, Alexis de, 11, 71. 



Victoria, Queen, 105, 106. 

W 

Ware, John, 42. 

Wars, Napoleonic, 21. 

Wellington, Duke of, 21, 104. 

Wendell, Prof. Barrett, 5. 

Wilson, J. Grant, quoted, 91 n. 

Wilson, Robert A., criticises 
Prescott's Conquest of Mex- 
ico, 147, 148 ; reply to, 149- 
151. 

X 

Xenophon, Prescott compared 
with, 142, 143. 



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HUME. By T. H. Huxley, F.R.S. LOCKE. By Thomas Fowler. 

BURKE. By John Morley. 
FIELDING. By Austin Dobson. THACKERAY. By Anthony 

Trollope. DICKENS. By Adolphus William Ward. 
GIBBON. By J. Cotter Morison. CARLYLE. By John Nichol. 

MACAULAY. By J. Cotter Morison. 
SIDNEY. By J. A. Symonds. DE QUINCEY. By David Masson. 

SHERIDAN. By Mrs. Oliphant. 
POPE. By Leslie Stephen. JOHNSON. By Leslie Stephen. 

GRAY.' By Edmund Gosse. 
BACON. By R. W. Church. BUNYAN. By J. A. Froude. 

BENTLEY. By R. C. Jebb. 



PUBLISHED BY 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK 



1 1:1905 



